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The stupid simple way I did this ages ago was:

1. Start with a-z.

2. Drop all vowels, numbers, most homoglyphs, and the letter 'x'.

3. Map digits 0-9 to one of the remaining letters.

4. Stringify the integer and replace the digit in each decimal place with its corresponding character.

For my use-case, all the numbers were >7 digits long, so the odds of you getting an offensive acronym were reasonably low unless you started combining them.

But there's no perfect solution. As this dataset shows, you can find offense in almost anything if you look hard enough:

California Personalized License Plate Requests Flagged for Review 2015-2016: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18IUVU9Q4uN_lxqNd5AsN...



Many of those reviewer comments are utterly moronic. And that is my polite opinion.

How does this work? Is there a review board? Is it put to public review? A few of them like "dick out" and "shtlord" are reasonable, but many of them seem so bonkers it looks like the work of trolls.

Anyway, TIL that 1970s Intel was a MS-13 gang outfit and that Octocat really means "eight vaginas".


> Many of those reviewer comments are utterly moronic.

Reason for review: hostile, insulting, or degrading

/s


WONTFIX: behaves as intended.


Most numbers can be used as letters or phonemes.

I could give a fuck about avoiding swear words, but if you want to avoid slurs and eyebleach-inducing ideas and still have any sort of compact representation, I suspect we have to look not at problematic letters but problematic groups of letters. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the letter E. Not with G, I, N, or R, but you can sure get a lot of attention you don't want by arranging them in the wrong order. K and Y aren't bad either, unless you're hating on Jewish people.

So maybe there's a 5:4 or a 5:3 encoding out there where you avoid making syllables.


> California Personalized License Plate Requests Flagged for Review 2015-2016: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18IUVU9Q4uN_lxqNd5AsN...

Wow this is a funny peek into a weird perdicment where people need to justify that they have a good reason to have a specific license plate.

Some seems obviously ok such as:

INT13H

314 PI

And some are obviously not:

DRY(hand emoji)JOB

DICK OUT

Come to think of it: Can license plates have emojis now?!


California allows one hand, star, or heart shape in the plate.




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