pick3letters

Pick3letters

Pick3letters is a program to help inspire you to create poetry or prose by taking a random string (hexadecimal strings and Torrent magnet links are currently supported) and outputting lists of word prefixes you can use. Just for fun, and for confirming that you used the right prefixes, it also supports recovering the original hex string or a working magnet link from the poetry or prose they came up with.

Usage

The output of pick3letters is a sequence of prefix lists, one per line. For each line, choose a word of at least 4 letters that starts with one of the prefixes. You may use capital letters and punctuation at the end of a word, but any word that starts with punctuation or has any punctuation mark within the prefix will be ignored during decoding. Words shorter than 4 letters will also be ignored, making it easy to insert articles, conjunctions, or fill words where needed while still being able to check your work by "decoding" it.

To "encode", pass -e. To get back the original data, pass -d. If your input or desired output is a hex string, pass -x, or if you want to use a magnet link pass -m.

The prefix list

The list of prefixes was generated with pick3letters/generate.py. That takes a list of words and their counts as input and generates a specified number of prefix lists as output, such that the sum of counts of each prefix in a group is approximately the same. It also allows filtering the list of words by minimum count to avoid unusual prefixes or typoes. You can also change the prefix length, the number of groups (which must be a power of 2), and the minimum word length.

Generating new prefix lists

You can run the generator with python3 -m pick3letters.generate for usage information. For now, you'd need to replace prefixes.py with its output, though at some point I'll probably add support for multiple prefix lists.