Spell a String Using the NATO Phonetic or the Morse Alphabet

The function splits a string into single characters and returns their representation in either the NATO phonetic alphabet or the Morse alphabet. The 26 code words in the NATO phonetic alphabet are assigned to the 26 letters of the English alphabet in alphabetical order as follows: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. Digits 0-9 are also supported.

StrSpell(x, upr = "CAP", type = c("NATO", "Morse"))

Arguments

x: character, the string to be encoded.
upr: character, a shortcut to be used to characterise capital letters. Ignored if type is set to "Morse". No distinction is made between upper and lower case if upr is set to NA or to an empty string "".
type: the type of phonetic alphabet, either "NATO" or "Morse".

Value

a character vector containing the code words

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

Author

Andri Signorell <andri@signorell.net>

Examples

# ... ever had to communicate a password by phone? ;-)
StrSpell("Yailov9teb6i")
#>  [1] "CAP Yankee" "Alfa"       "India"      "Lima"       "Oscar"     
#>  [6] "Victor"     "Nine"       "Tango"      "Echo"       "Bravo"     
#> [11] "Six"        "India"     

paste(StrSpell("Andri", type="Morse"), collapse="|")
#> [1] ".-|-.|-..|.-.|.."