ruby.rb

# Student: Thomas-0725;
# Status: Complete; could use some revision for clarity;
# Possible improvements: correctly preserve capitalization; elegantly deal with punctuation; treat 'y' as a vowel when appropriate (simple rule: if 'y' follows a consonant, it is a vowel.)

def translate(phrase)
  phrase.split.map {|word| pig_latin(word)}.join(" ")
end

def pig_latin(word)
  postfix="ay"

  split_position = PigLatinConsonants.first_non_consonant_position(word)
  split_position = 0 if split_position.nil?

  new_first_half = word[split_position..-1]
  new_second_half = word[0, split_position]

  "#{new_first_half}#{new_second_half}#{postfix}"
end

class PigLatinConsonants
  @@phonemes = %w[b c d f g h j k l m n p q r s t v w x y z qu]

  @@phonemes.sort_by {|phoneme|  phoneme.length}
  @@phonemes = @@phonemes.reverse #Puts larger phonemes at front so that they are checked first.

  # I would like to do away with masked_word and try to find a slightly less awkward way to do this.
  def PigLatinConsonants.first_non_consonant_position(word)
    #Don't modify existing word.
    masked_word = String.new(word.downcase)
    #Replace all consonants with masking character.
    @@phonemes.each {|phoneme| masked_word.gsub!(phoneme, "_"*phoneme.length)}
    #Find first occurrence of unmasked character.
    masked_word.index(/[^_]/)
  end
end

p translate("this is a test")