Code Green Software

Archive for February, 2009

Javascript: 1337-Speak Translator

February 3rd, 2009

So I borrowed this idea from a friend of mine who wrote the original implementation in C#, of which I ported to javascript because, well, I like playing in javascript.

Here’s a working example:

This is a simple method of converting between English and leet-speak. It uses Javascript’s regular expression library to do most of the heavy lifting, which led to a need to completely escape a string before using it in a regular expression. For this I borrowed some code from Simon Willison.

Here’s the html, pretty basic:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<body style="padding: 10px">
<div style="border: solid 1px Black; 
            padding: 5px; width: 350px; 
            background-color: White;">
    <label for="input">
        Enter message here:</label><br />
    <textarea id="input" name="input" rows="10" cols="40" 
    style="font-weight: bold;
           background-image: url('leetBG.png'); 
           background-attachment: fixed; 
           background-position: 160px 165px;
           background-repeat: no-repeat;"></textarea>
    <br />
    <input type="submit" value="Translate" 
     onclick="translateText();" />
    <select id="conversionType">
        <option value="e">English -> 1337</option>
        <option value="3">1337 -> English</option>
    </select>
</div>
</body>
</html>

And here’s the important stuff, the javascript:

<script type="text/javascript">
    // Create the Phrase translations arrays
    var PhrasesEnglish = 
        new Array('crap', 'dude', 'hacker',
                  'hacks', 'you', 'cool', 'oh my god',
                  'fear', 'power', 'own',
                  'what the hell', 'elite', 'for the win', 
                  'oh really', 'good game');
    var PhrasesLeet = 
        new Array('carp', 'dood', 'haxor', 'hax', 'joo',
                  'kewl', 'omg', 'ph43', 'powwah', 'pwn', 
                  'wth', 'leet', 'ftw', 'o rly', 'gg');
 
    // Create the Letter translations arrays
    var LettersEnglish = 
        new Array('n', 'b', 'k', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h',
                  'p', 'm', 'r', 'l', 'o', 'q', 's', 't',
                  'u', 'x', 'w', 'y', 'z', 'c', 'a', 'j', 
                  'i', 'v', ' ');
    var LettersLeet = 
        new Array('/\\/', '|}', '|X', '[)', '3', '|=', 'gee', '|-|',
                  '|*', '(\\/)', '|2', '1', '()', '0', '$', '+',
                  '|_|', '><', '\\X/', '\'/', '2', '<', '/\\', '_|', 
                  '|', '\\/', '  ');
 
    // Translates text in input area to/from leet speak
    function translateText() {
        var inputString = document.getElementById('input').value;
 
        if (document.getElementById('conversionType').value == "e") {
            for (i = 0; i < PhrasesEnglish.length; ++i)
                inputString = inputString.replace(
                        new RegExp(PhrasesEnglish[i], "gi"),
                        PhrasesLeet[i]
                        );
 
            for (i = 0; i < LettersEnglish.length; ++i)
                inputString = inputString.replace(
                        new RegExp(LettersEnglish[i], "gi"),
                        LettersLeet[i]
                        );
        }
        else {
            for (i = 0; i < LettersLeet.length; ++i)
                inputString = inputString.replace(
                        new RegExp(RegExp.escape(LettersLeet[i]), "g"),
                        LettersEnglish[i]
                        );
 
            for (i = 0; i < PhrasesLeet.length; ++i)
                inputString = inputString.replace(
                        new RegExp(RegExp.escape(PhrasesLeet[i]), "g"),
                        PhrasesEnglish[i]
                        );
        }
 
        document.getElementById('input').value = inputString;
    }
 
    // This function is used to escape any special regular expression
    // characters in the search strings used to convert from leet to
    // english. Taken from: http://simonwillison.net/2006/Jan/20/escape/
    RegExp.escape = function(text) {
      if (!arguments.callee.sRE) {
        var specials = [
          '/', '.', '*', '+', '?', '|', '$',
          '(', ')', '[', ']', '{', '}', '\\'
        ];
        arguments.callee.sRE = new RegExp(
          '(\\' + specials.join('|\\') + ')', 'g'
        );
      }
      return text.replace(arguments.callee.sRE, '\\$1');
    }
</script>

So that’s it! It’s quite a bit of code, and there’s probably a better way of doing it but it was a lot of fun. Please post any suggestions or questions you might have.