Phone Number Word Finder

Project Description

This is a utility program that finds words in a given phone number. Using the pattern found on a 12-key telephone, many phone number contain words that can aid in memory and be a fun fact to know. The user inputs a 10-digit phone number and the program returns two text files. The first contains all of the possible letter and number combinations and the second has all of those combinations that have segments matching words in a dictionary text file.

Development

This project was my first personal project after starting classes at the League of Amazing Programmers. I remembered a challenge my dad gave me when I was coding in Scratch. It had been too complicated for me then, but I wanted to try using my new knowledge of Java to solve it.

The code is not very pretty. I used a series of nested for loops to cycle through all of the possible permutations given the number in each digit. Since I was still an amatuer coder, I created long lists of variables instead of arrays.

Some limitations with my very concrete solution are that it takes a while to run and only finds words in specific sections of the phone number. This program only will register words in the first 3, first 7, middle 3, and final 4 numbers.

While this challenge was definitely difficult for me when I was first learning Java, I learned a lot during the process. I would definitely recommend this to anyone with only a little bit of programming experience under their belt. With the knowledge I have now, I would solve this much differently, but it is really interesting to see my ideas from many years ago.

Download

If you would like to test this code, here is a download link. Just extract the zip folder and run the JAR file using java 11. It will create 2 additional files: finish.txt and phone.txt. To see the words in your phone number, look in finish.txt. If you would like a more simplified result, you can try this online resource, though I don't know how secure it is. Use at your own discretion.