NAME

SYNOPSIS

    use Games::Dissociate;
    ...
    $brilliant_prose = dissociate($normal_prose);

or

    perl -MGames::Dissociate -e dissociate_filter meno.txt

ABSTRACT

(I actually intended to make it a straight port, but couldn't manage it -- the code in "dissociate.el" is totally uncommented, and is especially obscure Lisp.)

This module also provides a procedure "dissociate_filter", for use in the one-liner context:

  perl -MGames::Dissociate -e 'dissociate_filter(2)'
    < thesis.txt  > snip.txt

or

  perl -MGames::Dissociate -e 'dissociate_filter(-2)'
    < thesis.txt  > snip.txt

or in a script consisting of

  #!/usr/local/bin/perl
  use Games::Dissociate;  dissociate_filter;

PARAMETERS AND USAGE

dissociate($input, $group_size, $max)

The function "dissociate" takes three parameters:

  $output = dissociate($input, $group_size, $max);
    

$input is the input string, hopefully containing a stretch of (plaintext) text in a human language, encoded either in just plain US-ASCII, or in a character-encoding your locale settings know about. $output will be "dissociated text" (charmingly generated gibberish) based on that input text. (Note that output will contain no line-breaks or tabs. Yoy may wish, as "dissociate_filter" does, to pass the output thru Text::Wrap's "wrap".)

You'll get strange output if $input contains markup (HTML, LaTeX, etc.), or is very short, or is not in a human language.

$group_size is the number of tokens (words or characters) that must be in common between bits of text the dissociation algorithm skips between. A positive value means you want to dissociate by character, with a group-size of that many characters (4 = 4 characters); a negative value means you want to dissociate by word, with a group size of that many words (-2 = 2 words). I suggest values between -3 and 5; I'm a fan of -2. A $group_size value of 0 or 1 is invalid, and currently causes "dissociate" to use the default value of 2 (2 characters) instead. A value of -1 is invalid, and currently causes "dissociate" to use the value of -2 (2 words) instead. The behavior/validity of $group_size values of 0, 1, or -1 may change in future versions.

$max is a parameter used to control the maximum number of iterations of "dissociate"'s central loop -- it corresponds roughly to the number of "chunks" of text you get back, where a chunk is N * -$group_size words for negative values of $group_size, and N * $group_size characters for positive values of $group_size. $max must be greater than 1.

If you need (!) more precise control over the size of the output text, try setting set $max high and trim the output to size, and/or try calling "dissociate" multiple times until you get the amount of output you want. (But be sure to give up if "dissociate" keeps returning nullstring, as it will in some strange cases.)

"dissociate" can also be called with the following syntaxes:

  dissociate($input, $group_size);
   # acts like max of 100

  dissociate($input);
   # acts like group size of 2 (characters) and max of 100
    

dissociate_filter()

dissociate_filter($group_size)

dissociate_filter($group_size, $max)

This library also provides the procedure "dissociate_filter", which pulls input from "<>" (files specified on the command line, or STDIN), and sends dissociated output to STDOUT. It can be called with these syntaxes:

  dissociate_filter($group_size, $max);

  dissociate_filter($group_size);
   # uses a default value for $max

  dissociate_filter();
   # uses a default value for $group_size and $max
    

These above-mentioned default values can come from command line switches, if you make a script consisting of:

  #!/usr/local/bin/perl
  use Games::Dissociate;
  dissociate_filter;
    

and call that script, say, "dissociate", and call it as:

  dissociate -c5 -m200 < foo.txt
    

or

  dissociate -w2 -m70 foo.txt bar.txt | less
    

and so on.

To explain the switches:

"-w[number]" specifies a by-word dissociation with that number of words as the group size, "-c[number]" specifies a by-character dissociation with that number of characters as the group size, "-m[number]" specifies a default for $max.

If you don't specify a default for $group_size or $max, $group_size defaults to 100 and $max defaults to 2 (characters).

SEE ALSO

COPYRIGHT

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

REMINDER

AUTHOR