Additional information

ACRONYM n. A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as RADAR for RAdio Detection And Ranging. (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)

SNAFU is a famous acronym. Do you know its origin?

Part 1

Some input strings will contain numbers or other characters that are not wanted. For instance The "university" of California at San Diego is UCSD, not "U"CSD, or even worse, "CSD.

Write a function that can take a string and return a new string from which non-letter characters have been removed. (Hint: The string module contains a variable called string.letters that contains all letters. You would do well to explore the string module looking for other useful functions.) As an example, your finished function should be able to take the string "/my/ house" and return "my house".

For full credit, the definition of this function must be removeJunk(mystring), and it must return a string.

sample test: removeJunk('Hello, world!') == 'Hello world'

Part 2

Write a function that finds the individual words in your cleaned-up string. (Hint: You may use the 'split()' function from the string module in your function, or write your own function to do this.)

For full credit, the definition of this function must be stringToWords(mystring), and it must return a list of strings.

sample test: stringToWords('Hello world') == ['Hello', 'world']

Part 3

Write a function that removes the words "of", "at", "the", and "and" from a list of words.

For full credit, the definition of this function must be removeUnwantedWords(list), and it must return a list of strings.

sample test: removeUnwantedWords(['the', 'of', 'at', 'and', 'hello']) == ['hello']

Part 4

Use the functions you have already written to compose a function that takes a string as an argument and outputs an acronym. You MUST use all the functions written in Parts 1-3 for full credit. Output the acronym in uppercase letters.

For full credit, this function must be defined as generateAcronym(mystring), and it must also return a string.

sample test: generateAcronym('United States of America') == 'USA'

Final notes

What happens if someone tries generateAcronym(5)? It's not clear what the output should be, but at least make sure that your program doesn't crash!

You will find this assignment MUCH easier if you test each function you write as soon as you finish witting it, rather than waiting until you put them all together in Part 4.