Learn to Program with Small Basic

TRY IT OUT 18-7
Write a program that takes a pig latin word as input and shows its original
English word.
Fix My Spelling
Now we’ll develop a game that displays misspelled words and asks the player
to enter the correct spelling. The game creates misspelled words by inserting
a random letter at a random position in an English word. There could
be more than one correct spelling of misspelled simple words. For example,
if the game displays mwall, either mall or wall could be correct. To keep the
game simple, we’ll ignore that possibility and insist on a particular spelling
for the correct answer.
First, we select the word to be misspelled
from a predefined array of words and save the
selected word in a variable named strIn. We
then pick a random character randChar to insert
into strIn. The insertion position charPos is a
random number between 1 and the length of
strIn. Figure 18-6 shows the process of generating
the misspelled word hewlp.
We first extract the substring from letter 1
to the letter at position charPos – 1 and assign
it to strOut (because charPos is 3, this makes
strOut = "he"). We then append randChar to
strOut (this makes strOut = "hew"). We extract
the substring from position charPos to the end
strIn
strOut
h e l p
h e w l p
w l p
randChar
at charPos 3
Figure 18-6: Illustrating the
process of generating misspelled
words
("lp" in this case) and append it to strOut (this makes strOut = "hewlp").
Listing 18-8 shows the complete program. Make sure you download and
open FixMySpelling.sb from this chapter’s folder to get the full list of the
words we wrote for this program.
1 ' FixMySpelling.sb
2 words = "1=mountain;2=valley;...;22=animation;" ' See file for full list
3
4 While ("True") ' Runs forever
5 strIn = words[Math.GetRandomNumber(Array.GetItemCount(words))]
6 randChar = Text.GetCharacter(96 + Math.GetRandomNumber(26))
7 charPos = Math.GetRandomNumber(Text.GetLength(strIn))
8
9 strOut = Text.GetSubText(strIn, 1, charPos - 1)
10 strOut = strOut + randChar
11 strOut = strOut + Text.GetSubTextToEnd(strIn, charPos)
12
13 TextWindow.Write("Enter correct spelling for [" + strOut + "]: ")
14 ans = TextWindow.Read()
15 ans = Text.ConvertToLowerCase(ans)
16 If (ans = strIn) Then
Advanced Text Magic 277