Question

Soundex is a system that encodes a word into a letter followed by three numbers that roughly describe how the word sounds. Similar sounding words have the same four-character codes. For instance, the words Carrot and Caret are both coded as C123. A slight variation of the Soundex coding algorithm is as follows:

1)Retain the first letter.
2)For the remaining letters, delete all occurrences of a, e, i, o, u, h, y, and w.
3)Assign numbers to the other letters that remain so that
(a) b, f, p, and v become 1
(b) c, g, j, k, q, s, x, and z become 2
(c) d and t both become 3
(d) l (i.e., el) becomes 4
e) m and n become 5
(f) r becomes 6
4)If two or more letters that have been replaced by the same number were next to each other in the original full word, keep only the first of them.
5)Keep only the first four characters of what you have left. If you have fewer than four, then add zeros on the end to make the string have length four.
Write a program that carries out the algorithm.

Answer 1

The Soundex algorithm described in the student's question is used to encode words based on their phonetic pronunciation, where similar sounding words share the same code. The modified version of the algorithm retains the first letter, removes vowels and certain consonants, assigns numbers to the remaining letters, and handles consecutive identical numbers and string length constraints. A computer program can be developed to implement this algorithm.

Step-by-step explanation:

Soundex Coding Algorithm Implementation

The Soundex system is an algorithm used to categorize phonetically, such that words pronounced similarly are encoded to the same representation. The student's question involves coding a slightly modified version of the Soundex algorithm. Following the steps outlined:

1. Retain the first letter of the word.
2. Remove all occurrences of vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and the letters h, y, and w.
3. Replace the remaining letters with numbers according to the specified mapping (b, f, p, v = 1; c, g, j, k, q, s, x, z = 2; d, t = 3; l = 4; m, n = 5; r = 6).
4. When identical numbers occur consecutively due to adjacent letters in the original word, only retain the first.
5. Trim or pad the resulting string to ensure a length of four characters.

Applying this algorithm, a computer program can be written in various programming languages to generate Soundex codes for a given list of words.