phonetics

I'm trying to write a program that will switch any letter of the alphabet (upper or lower cases) into the Phontic alphabet. For example, If I enter "A" or "a" my program will give me (change it to) "Alpha". I've done so much research on this and switch statements but I keep getting stuck. I've realized that I can't use 'char' in a scanner. However, when I change 'char' into a 'String' my switch statement messes up (specifically the toUpperCase in my code gets underlined. I can't see my mistake. Here's what I've done so far: import java.util.Scanner; public class PhoneticTranslate { public

I would like to download an English dictionary -- not just a word list -- in a structured format such as TXT, XML, or SQL. Specifically, I need phonetic pronunciation and parts of speech (definition is not required). Surprisingly, I can't find this online anywhere. Wiktionary is available for download , but it is only the MediaWiki articles themselves. Crawling all articles and extracting the phonetics and parts of speech would be a huge exercise. Is this available anywhere? I don't mind paying. Edit: a few people have asked what I would like to do. My immediate need is just curiosity, for

For the purpose of identifying [possible] bot-generated usernames. Suppose you have a username like "bilbomoothof" .. it may be nonsense, but it still contains pronouncable sounds and so appears human-generated. I accept that it could have been randomly generated from a dictionary of syllables, or word parts, but let's assume for a moment that the bot in question is a bit rubbish. Suppose you have a username like "sdfgbhm342r3f", to a human this is clearly a random string. But can this be identified programatically? Are there any algorithms available (similar to Soundex, etc..) that can

Given two strings text1 and text2 public SOMEUSABLERETURNTYPE Compare(string text1, string text2) { // DO SOMETHING HERE TO COMPARE } Examples: First String: StackOverflow Second String: StaqOverflow Return: Similarity is 91% The return can be in % or something like that. First String: The simple text test Second String: The complex text test Return: The values can be considered equal Any ideas? What is the best way to do this? There are various different ways of doing this. Have a look at the Wikipedia "String similarity measures" page for links to other pages with algorithms. I don't think