Word Separators

You may be confused what does this mean how you could benefit from this post, actually this is really useful when you are using a GUI based operating system.

Consider this, when you want to click a part of a long string, for example to rename a folder, but you actually want part of the folder name, suppose the folder name is folder-name-info1, when the folder name is in rename mode, meaning it can be editted, you double click on the info1, this part is actually highlighted and ready to be copied.

So how you could decide on your system what are the chars or punctuations that could separate words within a whole string or a paragraph of text. The following code is able to generate a string that contains punctuations and word inserted between.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import string
import random

# Create a string of punctuation marks with VT/VA related words between them
punctuation = string.punctuation
va_related_words = [
    "hokies", "blacksburg", "roanoke", "virginia", 
    "tyrod", "beamer", "lane", "torg", "burruss",
    "drillfield", "pylons", "cassell", "hokie", "gobble",
    "nova", "arlington", "tysons", "fairfax", "loudoun",
    "alexandria", "richmond", "norfolk", "chesapeake",
    "shenandoah", "potomac", "maroon", "orange",
    "sandman", "skipper", "cadet", "corps", "innovation",
    "techcenter", "metro", "dulles", "pentagon", "smithsonian"
]

result = ""
for i, punct in enumerate(punctuation):
    result += punct
    if i < len(punctuation)-1:  # Don't add word after last punctuation
        result += random.choice(va_related_words)

print(result)

The following is the generated text string, you could try to click on the words and see if certain part has been highlighted, it is possible one word is highlighted, and it is also possible that multiple words with punctuations are lighlighted, depending on your OS, just try to click on the word of the following text.

!cassell"fairfax#hokie$lane%drillfield&tysons'arlington(drillfield)nova*gobble+pentagon,tysons-burruss.sandman/beamer:nova;burrusschesapeake?torg@blacksburg[norfolk\sandman]skipper^corps_hokie`arlington{beamer|pentagon}metro~cadet<smithsonian=potomac>

It should be noted that on Mac, each app has its own definition of word separators, for example, iTerm2 would not consider / as a word separator which is different from the default OS setting, you could click on a path that contains /, it would highlight the whole path to a folder or file, which makes things easier.

You could try it on your OS to see what are the separators, this could be useful for you to design what the name of folders would be like by using certain separators.