technique to enter text using a mobile phone keypad (T9 dictionary-based disambiguation)

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

Justin Azoff:
> It takes a second or two to read the list of words in,

Nice solution. If you want to speed up the initialization phase you may
use something like this (it requires a bit more memory, because lines
contains all the words).

Note that the words and numbers have the same sorting order, so you may
use this to speed up the sorting a little, like doing it on words only
(that is the lines list), but for small dictionaries sort is fast
enough already, so this isn't much important.

Note: you have to add another 9 to numbers, because z too is associated
to 9.

import string

class Phone:
    def __init__(self):
        numbers = '22233344455566677778889999'
        convtable = string.maketrans(string.lowercase, numbers)
        lines =
file("/usr/share/dict/words").read().lower().splitlines()
        words = []
        for line in lines:
            word = line.strip()
            nums = word.translate(convtable)
            words.append( (nums, word) )

        words.sort()
        self.dict = words

p = Phone()

Bye,
bearophile