Pangram Tester

[boops boops]

A pangram is one of those sentences like "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog" which contains every letter of the English alphabet. For all I know they may exist in other languages too. They have a minor practical use: for showing off font examples. There is an art to writing a pangram which is as short as possible but still reads like a proper sentence. See here for more information and examples.

I was amusing myself trying to invent new pangrams on paper. Checking whether you haven't missed any letters is a bit of a chore. So I made a little program that does that automatically. The program also shows the number of letters in the pangram, and it has a button for saving your pangrams to a text file.

The form contains two text boxes; the top one is multiline and the second one is read-only. The code is pretty simple:



Here's the code for the form:

Public Class PangramTesterForm

	Private _Alphabet As String = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
	Private _Punctuation As String = " .,-:;!?'""()[]{}/"
	Private _Pangram As New System.Text.StringBuilder

	Private Sub TextBox1_TextChanged(sender As Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles TextBox1.TextChanged
		Dim missingLetters As New System.Text.StringBuilder
		_Pangram = New System.Text.StringBuilder(TextBox1.Text.ToUpper)

		'Count letters excluding punctuation:
		For Each ch As Char In _Punctuation
			_Pangram.Replace(ch, "")
		Next
		lblCountLetters.Text = "Total number of letters = " & _Pangram.Length.ToString

		'Check for missing letters:
		For Each ch As Char In _Alphabet.ToCharArray
			If Not _Pangram.ToString.Contains(ch) Then
				missingLetters.Append(ch)
				missingLetters.Append(" ")
			End If
		Next
		TextBox2.Text = missingLetters.ToString

	End Sub

	Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As System.Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

		'Save the pangram to a file.
		Using sfd As New SaveFileDialog
			sfd.DefaultExt = "txt"
			sfd.OverwritePrompt = False
			If sfd.ShowDialog = Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK Then
				Using sw As New IO.StreamWriter(sfd.FileName, True)
					sw.WriteLine(TextBox1.Text)
				End Using
			End If
		End Using

	End Sub
End Class

I hope this inspires some amusing new pangrams.

BB