french-to-sms

Experimental project that converts French sentences to French sms style sentences in JavaScript.

It should lead to smaller sentences that are still readable, even though some vocabulary may be known by younger people only 😄

Installation

npm install french-to-sms

Usage

const frenchToSms = require('french-to-sms');

frenchToSms("coucou");
// => "cc"

frenchToSms("Bonjour tout le monde ! J'espère que vous allez bien ! Moi la patate !");
// => "bjr tt lmond ! jspr k vs allé b1 ! mwa la patate !"

frenchToSms("S'il vous plaît, pouvez-vous faire moins de bruit ? Merci.");
// => "svp, pouvé vs fR - 2 brui ? marci."

Demo

You can test the algorithm out on this demo page.

Algorithm

The algorithm behind this project is based upon a custom-made glossary.

It performs one by one the characters replacements defined in the glossary.

Glossary

The glossary in its current state should enable a good quantity of french words and sentences to be shortened rather correctly. It was built from scratch by kind of reverse engineering the SMS French language and how it can be constructed.

Replacements

The glossary is divided in five distinct replacement categories:

• anywhere: replacements contained in this category will be performed anywhere within the input text (Useful for general rules, eg: double consonants is often useless apprends => aprends)
• endOfWords: replacements contained in this category will be performed only at the end of words (Useful for general rules at the end of words, eg: the e in words ending with e is often silent so we can get rid of it; pomme => pomm)
• startOfWords: replacements contained in this category will be performed only at the start of words (Useful for general rules at the start of words, eg: the h is often silent so we can get rid of it; haricot => aricot)
• wholeWords: replacements contained in this category will be performed only if they exactly match a whole word (Useful for words that need a specific conversion that does not follow general rules, eg: monsieur => mr)
• endOfWordsFollowedByASpace: replacements contained in this category will be performed only at the end of words that are followed by a space (Useful to replace the space as well, eg: je can often be contracted with what follows it; je suis => jsuis)

Actions

The glossary supports three types of actions:

• replace: to replace some characters by some other characters
• disable_modification: to prevent some characters from being replaced
• enable_modification: to re-allow some characters to be replaced

Disable/enable modification

By default, the whole text input is subject to replacements. Though, some characters can be protected from replacements for a given time.

For instance, we may want to replace every occurence of si by 6 as it is a good sms equivalent (sinon would become 6non, aussi would become au6).

But some sounds like sin often sound like zin so replacing si by 6 would be wrongly interpreted (usine would become u6ne). So we may want to disable replacements on sin while we replace all si occurrences by 6, then re-enable further replacements on sin.

Contributing

If for some reason you would like to enhance the glossary, feel free to do a pull request containing your modifications within the glossary as well as tests fixtures covering what you enhanced.