Question

I think it’s a common situation when one needs to contract certain phrases to make identifiers, preserving the original sense. Is there a software/algorithms to facilitate it?

I have a hundred word combinations each around 20 characters long which I want to turn into no-more-than-12-character-long identifiers.

An example:

CUSTOMER_ACCOUNT -> CUSTOMER_ACC
or even
CUSTOMER_ACCOUNT -> CUST_ACC

Answer 1

Solution A
Do it manually, load your words into any text processing editor, run Find-And-Replace with your words, for example:

• Find: CUSTOMER
• Replace with: CUST

It is human readable but requires manual work.

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Solution B
Use hashtable:

HASH | PHRASE
------------------------------
hash1| CUSTOMER_ACCOUNT
hash2| CUSTOMER_ACCOUNT_CREDIT

Hash function will be unique and you can tailor its length, the problem is, it is not human-readable.

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Solution C
If you store this somewhere (db, xml, etc.) you can have a structure like

metacode
struct
{
   GUID id;
   string Name;
}

Each phrase has its own unique id and the text. Internally you use GUID, but for display purposes you use text representation.