Best practice

Ok, I have a question on what would be the best practice for a translator...

If you have 5 languages: English, Chinese, German, French, and Swedish and you have different methods for converting each one into each other what would bet he best practice

Heres an example: If you selected Chinese as the starting Language and English as the Ending Language it'll return "zh-CN%7Cen" as the code needed to post.

I'm thinking i'll create an enum to store all the languages and then create
a struct that takes the enum twice, once for starting and once for ending, and then a value.

so i'll have something like

struct LanguagePairs
{
Lang langStart;
Lang langEnd;
String code;
}
and then a list that holds them all

List<LangPairs> list = new List<LangPairs>();

list.AddRange(new LangPair[]
{
new LangPair(Lang.Chinese, Lang.English, "zh-CN%7Cen"),
new LangPair(Lang.English, Lang.Chinese, "en%7zh-CN")
}

is there a better way to do this

Answer this question

Best practice

Harvey Norman

From a brief look: In general, classes are preferred to structs.
Ulrik Sorensen
This is the code i've came up with so far, Let me know if you guys have better ideas

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;
using System.Web;
namespace SontekNET.Google
{
public enum Language
{
English,
German,
Spanish,
French,
Italian,
Portuguese,
Japanese,
Korean,
Chinese
}
public struct LanguagePair
{
private Language language;
public Language Language
{
get { return language; }
set { language = value; }
}
private string code;
public string Code
{
get { return code; }
set { code = value; }
}
public LanguagePair(Language lang, string value)
{
this.language = lang;
this.code = value;
}

}
public struct AvailableConversion
{
private Language startingLanguage;
public Language StartingLanguage
{
get { return startingLanguage; }
set { startingLanguage = value; }
}

private Language endingLanguage;
public Language EndingLanguage
{
get { return endingLanguage; }
set { endingLanguage = value; }
}
public AvailableConversion(Language start, Language end)
{
this.startingLanguage = start;
this.endingLanguage = end;
}
}
public class Translator
{
private string GetURL(string text, string langPair)
{
string value = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(text);
string pair = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(langPair);
string temp = String.Format(@"http://translate.google.com/translate_t text={0}&langpair={1}", value, pair);
return temp;
}
public List<LanguagePair> languages;
public List<AvailableConversion> conversions;
public Translator()
{
PopulateLanguages();
PopulateConversions();
}
#region <-- Screen Scraping -->
public List<DictionaryEntry> GetTranslatedText(Language startLanguage, string text)
{
List<DictionaryEntry> translations = new List<DictionaryEntry>();
foreach (AvailableConversion conv in conversions)
{
if (conv.StartingLanguage == startLanguage)
{
translations.Add(GetTranslatedText(text, conv.StartingLanguage, conv.EndingLanguage));
}
}
return translations;
}
public DictionaryEntry GetTranslatedText(string text, Language start, Language end)
{
string url = GetURL(text, GetLangPair(start, end));
WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
string content = reader.ReadToEnd();

int startIndex = content.IndexOf("<textarea");
int startIndex2 = content.IndexOf(">", startIndex);
int endIndex = content.IndexOf("</textarea>", startIndex2);

string temp = content.Substring(startIndex2+1, endIndex - startIndex2-1);
return new DictionaryEntry(end, temp);
}
private string GetLangPair(Language start, Language end)
{
string code1 = String.Empty;
string code2 = String.Empty;
foreach (LanguagePair lang in languages)
{
if (lang.Language == start)
code1 = lang.Code;
if (lang.Language == end)
code2 = lang.Code;
}
return String.Format("{0}|{1}", code1, code2);
}
#endregion
#region <-- Populating Information -->
private void PopulateConversions()
{
conversions = new List<AvailableConversion>();

AddConversion(Language.English, Language.German, Language.Spanish,
Language.French, Language.Italian, Language.Portuguese,
Language.Korean, Language.Chinese);

AddConversion(Language.German, Language.French);
}
private void PopulateLanguages()
{
languages = new List<LanguagePair>();
languages.AddRange(new LanguagePair[]
{
new LanguagePair(Language.Chinese, "zh-CN"),
new LanguagePair(Language.English, "en"),
new LanguagePair(Language.French, "fr"),
new LanguagePair(Language.German, "de"),
new LanguagePair(Language.Italian, "it"),
new LanguagePair(Language.Japanese, "ja"),
new LanguagePair(Language.Korean, "ko"),
new LanguagePair(Language.Portuguese, "pt"),
new LanguagePair(Language.Spanish, "es")
});
}
private void AddConversion(Language lang1, params Language[] langs)
{
foreach (Language lang in langs)
{
conversions.Add(new AvailableConversion(lang1, lang));
conversions.Add(new AvailableConversion(lang, lang1));
}
}
#endregion
}
}
Bin Zhou
You got a very long question. :) If it works, then you're set.
Best practice

Answer this question

Best practice

Hot Topic

Visual C#

Best practice

Best practice

Harvey Norman

Ulrik Sorensen

Bin Zhou