spellabc.go & spellout

spellabc.go is a GoLang package for converting strings into their equivalent spelling alphabet (a.k.a. phonetic alphabet) code word representation. Useful for oral communication (e.g., spelling things out over the phone), the package supports a number of common alphabets as well as the ability to use custom encodings.

For characters classified as letters, spellabc will return a lowercase/uppercase code word based on the capitalization. Unknown characters are simply returned without conversion.

spellout is an included command-line utility (also written in Go) that serves as an example application of the spellabc package.

Usage

Usage: spellout [OPTIONS] STRING...

Available alphabets include JAN (Joint Army/Navy), LAPD, NATO,
WesternUnion, and UsFinancial.

  -a, --alphabet=  alphabet output is encoded in [NATO]
  -v, --verbose    include input characters along with output
  -h, --help       display this help message

Each string will have its output printed on a separate line, and spellout will honor using -- to stop interpreting the subsequent arguments as options.

Examples

$ spellout Example123
ECHO x-ray alpha mike papa lima echo One Two Three

$ spellout --alphabet UsFinancial Example123
EDDIE xavier adam mary peter larry eddie One Two Three

$ spellout --verbose Aaron "Bull Schaefer"
Aaron  =  ALPHA alpha romeo oscar november
Bull Schaefer  =  BRAVO uniform lima lima Space SIERRA charlie hotel alpha echo foxtrot echo romeo

$ spellout --verbose -- --help
--help  =  Dash Dash hotel echo lima papa

$ spellout aΦx
alpha Φ x-ray

And if you want to pass spellout the output from another command or the contents of a file, just pipe it through xargs:

$ cat secrets | xargs spellout --verbose --
4PN%mAnt  =  Four PAPA NOVEMBER Percent mike ALPHA november tango
5Jzd}y(d  =  Five JULIET zulu delta RightBrace yankee LeftParens delta
BTW{2J~l  =  BRAVO TANGO WHISKEY LeftBrace Two JULIET Tilde lima

One last tip; when the contents of your file contains spaces and you only want to separate based on newlines:

$ cat example.txt
Line one
Line two
$ cat example.txt | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 spellout --verbose --
Line one  =  LIMA india november echo Space oscar november echo
Line two  =  LIMA india november echo Space tango whiskey oscar

Build Instructions

Assuming that you already have Go installed, have set a proper $GOROOT environment variable, and are inside of a workspace defined in your $GOPATH, you can just use Go itself to download and build the spellabc package:

$ go get github.com/elasticdog/spellabc

Then import the package in your source file as usual:

import (
	"github.com/elasticdog/spellabc"
)

Likewise, to build the spellout binary:

$ go get github.com/elasticdog/spellabc/spellout

Then feel free to move/copy the spellout binary file to wherever you like:

$ cp $GOPATH/bin/spellout /usr/local/bin/spellout

Credits

spellabc was inspired by the output from the no-longer-in-existence WinGuides Secure Password Generator that disappeared back in January 2007, and the similarly inspired Lingua::Alphabet::Phonetic::Password Perl module written by James FitzGibbon.

License

spellabc is provided under the terms of the MIT License.

Copyright © 2012 Aaron Bull Schaefer