Generate Belle Absente poems from works of literature! Can also be used to find naturally-occurring lipograms.

Belle Absente: A poetic form developed by members of a French collective of mathematician-poets in the 1960s.

In a Belle Absente poem, each line is a pangrammatic lipogram (it contains every letter of the alphabet except for one). Together, the missing letters in each line spell out a person's name or initials.

As a form, the Belle Absente - which translates roughly to "Beautiful Outlaw" - plays with notions of loss, longing, and constraint. Taken line-by-line, the absence of a letter is rarely noticable. But as the reader progresses through the poem, the cumulative effect of the missing letters becomes increasingly visible.

This program searches one or more input text files for sentences that are pangrammatic lipograms (the building blocks of a Belle Absente). It can also be used to search for sentences that are just lipograms (specify the lipogram flag instead of the belle_absente flag).

¹ The default alphabet is missing j, q, z (the 3 most infrequently used letters in the English language), in accordance with Georges Perec's approach to the Belle Absente. This accommodation results in better poetry.

A text file containing:

1. A list of files (if directory was specified) that contain a Belle Absente
2. A per-file breakdown of every pangrammatic lipogram for each of the Belle Absente letters

git clone https://github.com/chloerevery/BelleAbsenteBot.git

Make a Belle Absente for Ruth Bader Ginsburg using contents of the /books directory:

python3 belle_absente_bot.py -directory books/ -belle_absente rgb

Make a Belle Absente for Ruth Bader Ginsburg using the text of Don Quixote:

python3 belle_absente_bot.py -file books/quixote.txt -belle_absente rgb

Find lipograms missing the letter J in Les Miserables:

python3 belle_absente_bot.py -file books/miz.txt -lipogram j

Make a Belle Absente for Jean Valjean using the text of Les Miserables:

python3 belle_absente_bot.py -file books/miz.txt -belle_absente jvj

MIT