Yahoo! Hacks

Spell Words with Yahoo! Images

Web of Letters combines Yahoo! Image Search results to spell a single word.

The Web of Letters is a PHP script that uses the Yahoo! Image Search API to grab images of letters from all over the Web to spell words. The results—a combination of photos and illustrations—are always surprising and can even look like modern art. You simply type a word into a web form, and the script assembles the images.

The key to the hack is transforming the user’s word into the proper Yahoo! query. When the user enters hello, the code queries Yahoo! Image Search for each letter in the word—”letter h“, "letter e“, "letter l“, and so on—eventually spelling the complete word, as shown in Figure 5-13.

Figure 5-13. The word “hello” assembled from Yahoo! Images

When the character is a number, the query syntax is "number 1“, "number 2“, etc. When the character is a symbol, the code queries Yahoo! for its full name; the symbol & becomes ampersand.

You can try a working Web of Letters is at http://blog.outer-court.com/yahoo/letters.php5.

The Code

Web of Letters uses PHP5, and you can start by creating a file called letters.php5. In addition to a standard HTML head, add the following code to accept a query parameter q:

	$q = ( isset($_POST['q']) ) ? $_POST['q'] : '';

Then add the following XHTML snippet, which will ask the user for input:

<form action="letters.php5" method="post"><div> Enter ...