miguelcobain / jalphabet

The Java Alphabet Library (JAL) - Custom alphabet manipulation library

The Java Alphabet Library (JAL)#

JAL is an utility library intended to help people to create manipulate custom Alphabets. This is particularly useful, for example, for identification code generators.

This library conveniently treats alphabets as a Mathematical Numeral System. The goal is to be able to easily convert between alphabets and to make arithmetic operations on your custom alphabets.

You can easily create your custom Alphabets by extending the Alphabet abstract class, but JAL has some common alphabets previously packaged:

• Binary
• Octal
• Decimal
• Hexadecimal
• Uppercase latin alphabet
• Lowercase latin alphabet
• ASCII
• Base64
• Code39
• DNA

Example

Just a simple example of conversion between alphabets. Sugar syntax for ya!

Binary b = new Binary();
Decimal d = new Decimal();

Word<Decimal> w1 = d.createWord("10"); // Use the alphabet to create valid words
Word<Binary> w2 = w1.convert().to(b); // Pass in an Alphabet implementation
Word<Hexadecimal> w3 = w1.convert().to(Hexadecimal.class); // Or just an Alphabet class. JAL instantiates the Alphabet for you!

System.out.println(w1+" "+w2+" "+w3);
// Prints "10 1010 A"

Imagine you want to implement a POS software. You may want to get the corresponding Code39 barcode string from the automatically generated database id.

Long idFromDatabase = 54341L;

Code39 c = new Code39();
Word<Code39> code = c.parseLong(idFromDatabase);

System.out.println(code);
// prints "S31"

JAL supports exclusions. Imagine that you don't want to consider the whole set of an Alphabet. You can create an Alphabet, providing the characters you want to exclude.

// Create a Code39 alphabet without special characters (for readability purposes, for example)
Code39 c = new Code39("* -$%./+");
// Use alphabet normally

TODO

• add support for arithmetic operations (It would be neat to be able to sum words)
• add support for the creation of "composite alphabets" through concatenation. For example, an Alphabet defined by Decimal+"/"+Code39. You could have a graph of alphabets, how awesome is that?
• unit testing
• more alphabets
• complete javadoc
• maybe the algorythms' performance can be improved

jalphabet's Issues

unit testing

unit testing

add support for exclusions

manually exclude certain characters from an existing alphabet

add support for arithmetic operations

It would be neat to be able to sum words, for example

implement more alphabets

implement more alphabets

add support for the creation of "composite alphabets"

add support for the creation of "composite alphabets" through concatenation. For example, an Alphabet defined by Decimal+"/"+Code39. You could have a graph of alphabets, how awesome is that?

Next Letter?

Is there a way to ask the Alphabet, I'm at Letter 'D', give me the next letter: 'E'?

Or, if I made a custom alphabet of '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz', could I keep calling a getNext() type function to go from 009 -> 00a, and ultimately, 00z to 010?