I wanted to make a book that begins in English and slowly turns into French (or Spanish, Italian, etc.), by replacing more and more phrases as it progresses. That way, context clues can be used to determine meaning much the same way they are used to figure out unfamiliar words in one’s native tongue.

Anyway, I thought this would be a good premise to base the first excercise of Programming A to Z on. On the command line, I created a text file of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid and replaced every instance of the word ‘little’ with ‘petite’, using the sed command.

Here’s the final output of mermaid_fr.