Random Nonsense Word Generator

As I went to sleep last night I was wondering how I could create some random word-like words, for something I’ve been working on. When I woke up, I had the solution! So, I thought I’d share how I did it.

The thing that was bothering me was where to find a list of dictionary words to look at to generate a nonsensical, but ‘word-like’ part of a word. I started thinking about dictionary.com and if they had some kind of API, amaong others.

Then it occurred to me that most Linux distros have a dictionary built in to the system. It lives at /usr/share/dict/words

So, with a little snippet of PHP, I was able to look at a part of this file and grab some characters.

here it is:

function makeNonsense($length){

        // used to create word fragments $length long

        $dictionaryFile = "/usr/share/dict/words";
        // eventually need to make this go higher than the rand max 32768
        $content=file_get_contents($dictionaryFile,FALSE,NULL,rand(0,32768),$length);
        // get rid of numbers. spaces and other characters
        $content = ereg_replace("[^a-zA-Z]", "", $content);
        $content = strtolower(str_replace(" ","",$content));
        $nonsense = str_replace("\n","",$content);
        return $nonsense;

}

And that’s it!