Self-Descriptive Sentence

A self-descriptive sentence generator. Targeting on any languages.

Background

What is a self-descriptive sentence?

Self-descriptive sentence, aka. autogram, is a sentence that describes itself in the sense of providing an inventory of its own characters.

Here I'd like to show a famous example:

This sentence employs two a’s, two c’s, two d’s, twenty-eight e’s, five f’s, three g’s, eight h’s, eleven i’s, three l’s, two m’s, thirteen n’s, nine o’s, two p’s, five r’s, twenty-five s’s, twenty-three t’s, six v’s, ten w’s, two x’s, five y’s, and one z.

And another type:

T is the first, fourth, eleventh, sixteenth, ... letter in this sentence, not counting spaces or commas

For more information, please check the Wikipedia page of Autogram.

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to build a program that could generate self-descriptive sentences.

As you may already known that there are several different types of self-descriptive (see above Wikipedia page). Here in this project I will firstly focus on the self-counting one. This kind of self-descriptive will present, for example, the total count of characters/words, the number of every single character/word, the number of every punctuation, and also the number of spaces if you want.

Also, I don't want to limit my program on English sentences only. It should work on different languages with minimal effort.

A Chinese self-counting sentence demo:

这个句子一共有七十五个字。其中有四个“十”；二个“子”；四个“三”；十二个“二”；二个“字”；一个“八”；三个“四”； 一个“六”；二个“七”；二个“中”；二个“其”；二个“共”；二个“这”；二个“句”；五个“一”；二十二个“个”；三个“有”； 一个“九”；三个“五”。

Program Usage

usage: self_descriptive_sentence [-h] [-v] [-l {chinese,number}]
                                 [-a ATTEMPTS] [-i ITERATIONS] [-V]
                                 [-0 | -1 | -s SEED]
                                 [text]

Self-Descriptive Sentence Generator

positional arguments:
  text                  a text will be included in the sentence (default: )

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --version         show program's version number and exit
  -l {chinese,number}, --language {chinese,number}
                        choose a language to generate sentence (default:
                        chinese)
  -a ATTEMPTS, --attempts ATTEMPTS
                        the maximum number of attempts (default: 20)
  -i ITERATIONS, --iterations ITERATIONS
                        the maximum number of iterations in each attempt
                        (default: 300)
  -V, --no-verbose      disable debug messages (default: False)
  -0, --down-to-zero    prefer zero when performing a decrease operation on a
                        count=2 character (default: False)
  -1, --down-to-one     prefer one when performing a decrease operation on a
                        count=2 character (default: False)
  -s SEED, --seed SEED  use a seeded Random object to randomly choose between
                        zero and one when performing a decrease operation on a
                        count=2 character (default: None)

Example

python self_descriptive_sentence -V:

一共有四十八个字，二个“共”，二个“有”，二个“字”，三个“一”，七个“二”，四个“三”，三个“四”，二个“五”，二个“七”，二个“八”，一个“九”，三个“十”，十五个“个”。

python self_descriptive_sentence -V 我写的这句话:

我写的这句话一共有七十四个字，二个“我”，二个“写”，二个“的”，二个“这”，二个“句”，二个“话”，二个“共”，二个“有”，二个“字”，五个“一”，十三个“二”，三个“三”，四个“四”，二个“五”，二个“七”，一个“八”，一个“九”，四个“十”，二十一个“个”。

python self_descriptive_sentence -V -l number 1:

1 employs 11 digits, 4 1's, 3 2's, 2 3's, 2 4's.

python self_descriptive_sentence -V -l number 123:

123 employs 17 digits, 4 1's, 4 2's, 2 3's, 4 4's, 1 6's, 2 7's.