pronounceable

This is an alphabetic encoding for numbers using "pronouncable" syllables (consonant/vowel pairs)

Using a combination of 20 consonants (excluding C) and 5 vowels each syllable encodes the same number of bits as two base 10 digits, so encoded length is roughly the same as pure numeric digits (there will be one extra character if the numeric length is odd).

This encoding may not have any practical purpose, the original use was for a simple way of generating nonsense words, but let me know if you come up with one.

Note, some time after developing this I discovered a couple similar efforts.

• jmettraux's rufus-mnemo (ruby) also is designed to encode integers and gives similar sounding results to Pronounceable but uses an explicit list of Japanese syllables (including some 3 character ones)
• Antti Huima's Bubble Babble is similar in spirit but takes (hex) strings rather than numbers as input. I'm not aware of any JavaScript implmentations but CPAN has one (perl).

Install

git clone http://github.com/femto113/node-pronounceable.git
cd node-pronounceable
npm link

Example

var p = require("pronounceable");

var a = p.encode(9787);
// a == "zixi"

// can change case and/or add spaces or non-alphabetic characters without problem
var b = [
  "ZIXI", // upper case
  "Zixi"  // mixed case
  "zi-xi" // injected hyphen
  "zixi " // trailing space
].map(function (s) { return p.decode(s); });
// b == [9787, 9787, 9787]

// drop a character or slip in a C and you get NaN
var c = [
  "zix"
  , "cixi"
].map(function (s) { return p.decode(s); });
// c == [NaN, NaN]

console.log(a, b, c);

TODO

• publish to npm, update install section