README.md

emoji poetry

generate random poetry using linguistics!

how to run it

good ol' npm install followed by npm run dev will give you a nice local server. build with npm run build. both of these commands run npm run build:emoji and then a vite command.

build:emoji generates the src/emojiData.json file, which is used by the website.

how it works

everything flows pretty much sequentially:

1. src.generateEmoji.ts uses the cmudict and unicode packages to get linguistic properties for a list of emoji characters. these packages bundle a lot of data so in order to avoid fetching them on the front end this file generates src/emojiData.json (via npm run build:emoji).

2. src/emoji.ts provides a nice wrapper around the data in src/emojiData.json

3. src/sequence.ts exposes a couple of things. the most important one is the match function, which takes in a scansion (a sequence of / and x characters and randomly picks emoji to fit that pattern). the other exports (matchWithConstrainedEnd, isEmojiValidAsEnding, and isSequenceValidAsEnding) are related to rhyming. all of these functions are used in src/template.ts.

4. src/template.ts is in charge of generating an entire template, with many scansion sequences and raw text. parseTemplate parses the template string and gives an array of atoms, and generate takes that array and generates emoji sequences where necessary (using generateAtom). rhyming related things live in this file because they need more context that a single sequence. rhyming works by picking rhyming emoji to go at the ends of sequences with the same rhyme group (denoted using a letter in parentheses at the end of a sequence).

5. src/useTemplate.ts wraps the functions in template.ts in a nice little react hook, to be used by the main component.

6. src/App.tsx is the main (and only) component. it triggers parsing and generation from template.ts via the useTemplate hook.