I wrote a bot recently that searches tweets for palindromes. A palindrome is any word, phrase, or sequence of numbers that is the same when written backwards. The number 101, the town of Wassamassaw, SC, the word “madam”, and the band name ABBA are all palindromes. The most famous one is, “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.”
This isn’t the first Twitter bot I’ve written, but it is the first one that I feel is interesting enough to share. You can take a look at it on Twitter to see what it is up to.
I set it up so that it only finds multi-word palindromes (so “Hannah,” “Anna,” “mom”, and “dad” are all out unless they are part of a larger palindromic phrase) and they must be 9 characters or longer, excluding spaces. That way its activity is somewhat throttled and the quality of palindromes found is higher. Theoretically. This is Twitter we’re talking about.
Why is this something that exists?
Purely for fun. Given enough time, the bot could find the next, “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” That would be pretty cool. Since I last checked it this morning it has retweeted tweets that include:
- “forever of”
- “never even”
- “did it, I did”
- and my favorite, “dammit I’m mad”
For now I hardcoded those into the bot so that it doesn’t repeat them, but when I get to it I will hook a database up to the bot so that it can add found phrases to the database and then check new ones against that set so it doesn’t repeat itself.
How it works
The fun part for me was writing the code that parses tweets and then finds symmetry across multiple words in the tweet. First, the bot parses each Tweet it can get (it can’t get all Tweets) by removing any punctuation, multiple spaces, and capital letters. That leaves it with just the words and numbers in the tweet.
Next it puts each word or number into an array, and from that array creates a new array of every possible combination of two or more sequential words or numbers. For example the 4 word tweet “hey what is new,” would be broken up into these 6 segments: “hey what,” “hey what is,” “hey what is new,” “what is,” “what is new,” and “is new.”
The bot then runs a function on each segment that looks for symmetry. That function, as you might have guessed, starts with the first and last character of each segment and works its way to the middle character (or pair of characters if the segment contains an even number of total characters) checking for matches. If they all match, then there is symmetry in that segment and the bot has found a palindrome.