Splitting and Joining Strings to Translate Morse Code 📇

Splitting and joining strings are two prominent actions in working on textual data. A good example of training these two concepts is to translating Morse codes. For this, we can create a Morse code dictionary like the following one:

codes = Dict(
  ".-"=>"A","-..."=>"B", "-.-."=>"C", "-.."=>"D", "."=>"E", "..-."=>"F", "--."=>"G",
  "...."=>"H", ".."=>"I", ".---"=>"J", "-.-"=>"K", ".-.."=>"L", "--"=>"M", "-."=>"N",
  "---"=>"O", ".--."=>"P", "--.-"=>"Q", ".-."=>"R", "..."=>"S", "-"=>"T", "..-"=>"U",
  "...-"=>"V", ".--"=>"W", "-..-"=>"X", "-.--"=>"Y", "--.."=>"Z", ".----"=>"1",
  "..---"=>"2", "...--"=>"3", "....-"=>"4", "....."=>"5", "-...."=>"6", "--..."=>"7",
  "---.."=>"8", "----."=>"9", "-----"=>"0", ""=>" "
)

So I consider an arbitrary rule that letters should be distinguished by a space and words by two spaces. So I define my morse function that gets an input of type String and another of type Dict{String, String}. First, it splits the input by a space and then translates each segment using the predefined dictionary. Then at the end, I join the content of the translated codes to accomplish the message:

function morse(code::String, dictionary::Dict{String, String})
  splitted = split(code, " ")
  letters = get.(Ref(dictionary), splitted, nothing)
  join(letters)
end

Now I'm ready to use the function:

morse(
  "..  .-.. --- ...- .  .--- ..- .-.. .. .-",
  codes
)

# "I LOVE JULIA"

But you know that Morse codes can also be used to deliver critical messages to the world. Then, do you want to try the translation of the following morse code?

morse(
  ".-- --- -- .- -.  .-.. .. ..-. .  ..-. .-. . . -.. --- --",
  codes
)

Cheers 🍻