a Simple simple dictionary

Factual Questions
1

Hello, I am a programmer of sorts, and I am looking for something I can not find, and I have a feeling someone here will know.

I have written a small application that if from a cellphone you send a email, it will talk to my email server, then my datbase, and return the result to the cellphone.

Ultimately, you will email a word in the subject, and it will give you the dictionary definition. Problem is the cellphones here in the US seem to be limited to 110 characters, which is not a whole lot, so I am looking to dump phonetics, as well as all the other possible definitions other than the first and most likely.

This is not a commercial servce, it is more a toy I am playing with in boredom.

So, dictionary.com and m-w.com are not responsive to my emails, anyone got a dictionary on CD that has some exporting capabilies, I am a mac programmer as well, so I have a limit on software resources that most PC people have, such as a exportable dictionary where I could define the export to limit itself to one definition.

I can easily truncate after the 110’th character, so that is a non issue.

Thanks

2

Seems to me that you could just parse the dictionary.com returned definition to strip it down to only the text between 1. and 2. That’s just a simple regex. I assume you can take it from there.

3

:slight_smile: I should have listed that as one of my criteria, that makes it work, not fun :stuck_out_tongue: And also reliant on the dictionary.com server allowing me to, as well as the format not changing a whole lot etc etc, this is more a toy than a program, but if it comes to it, I may take the regex string parsing road, though that is never ever fun.

4

Regexes not fun?!

You got a lot to learn about programming!

:smiley: