RegEx: Compare two strings to find Alliteration and Assonance

Question

would be possible to Compare two strings to find Alliteration and Assonance?

i use mainly javascript or php

Answer 1

To find alliterations in a text you simply iterate over all words, omitting too short and too common words, and collect them as long as their initial letters match.

text = ''
+'\nAs I looked to the east right into the sun,'
+'\nI saw a tower on a toft worthily built;'
+'\nA deep dale beneath a dungeon therein,'
+'\nWith deep ditches and dark and dreadful of sight'
+'\nA fair field full of folk found I in between,'
+'\nOf all manner of men the rich and the poor,'
+'\nWorking and wandering as the world asketh.'

skipWords = ['the', 'and']
curr = []

text.toLowerCase().replace(/\b\w{3,}\b/g, function(word) {
    if (skipWords.indexOf(word) >= 0)
        return;
    var len = curr.length
    if (!len || curr[len - 1].charAt(0) == word.charAt(0))
        curr.push(word)
    else {
        if (len > 2)
            console.log(curr)
        curr = [word]
    }
})

Results:

["deep", "ditches", "dark", "dreadful"]
["fair", "field", "full", "folk", "found"]
["working", "wandering", "world"]

For more advanced parsing and also to find assonances and rhymes you first have to translate a text into phonetic spelling. You didn't say which language you're targeting, for English there are some phonetic dictionaries available online, for example from Carnegie Mellon: ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/project/fgdata/dict