Create the English word for a number

Question

I cobbled together a function from various sources that takes an integer and returns it as its respective English word formatted as a string. The function is as follows:

def int2word(num, separator="-"):
    """Transforms integers =< 999 into English words

    Parameters
    ----------
    num : int
    separator : str

    Returns
    -------
    words : str
    """
    ones_and_teens = {0: "Zero", 1: 'One', 2: 'Two', 3: 'Three',
                      4: 'Four', 5: 'Five', 6: 'Six', 7: 'Seven',
                      8: 'Eight', 9: 'Nine', 10: 'Ten', 11: 'Eleven',
                      12: 'Twelve', 13: 'Thirteen', 14: 'Fourteen',
                      15: 'Fifteen', 16: 'Sixteen', 17: 'Seventeen',
                      18: 'Eighteen', 19: 'Nineteen'}
    twenty2ninety = {2: 'Twenty', 3: 'Thirty', 4: 'Forty', 5: 'Fifty',
                     6: 'Sixty', 7: 'Seventy', 8: 'Eighty', 9: 'Ninety', 0: ""}

    if 0 <= num < 19:
        return ones_and_teens[num]
    elif 20 <= num <= 99:
        tens, below_ten = divmod(num, 10)
        if below_ten > 0:
            words = twenty2ninety[tens] + separator + \
                ones_and_teens[below_ten].lower()
        else:
            words = twenty2ninety[tens]
        return words

    elif 100 <= num <= 999:
        hundreds, below_hundred = divmod(num, 100)
        tens, below_ten = divmod(below_hundred, 10)
        if below_hundred == 0:
            words = ones_and_teens[hundreds] + separator + "hundred"
        elif below_ten == 0:
            words = ones_and_teens[hundreds] + separator + \
                "hundred" + separator + twenty2ninety[tens].lower()
        else:
            if tens > 0:
                words = ones_and_teens[hundreds] + separator + "hundred" + separator + twenty2ninety[
                    tens].lower() + separator + ones_and_teens[below_ten].lower()
            else:
                words = ones_and_teens[
                    hundreds] + separator + "hundred" + separator + ones_and_teens[below_ten].lower()
        return words

    else:
        print("num out of range")

Answer 1

There's an easier way.

We have the num2words module which can be easily installed via pip:

pip install num2words

The advantage of this module is that it supports multiple languages:

• en (English, default)
• fr (French)
• de (German)
• es (Spanish)
• lt (Lithuanian)
• lv (Latvian)
• en_GB (British English)
• en_IN (Indian English)
• no (Norwegian)
• pl (Polish)
• ru (Russian)
• dk (Danish)
• pt_BR (Brazilian Portuguese)

More, you can even generate ordinal numbers like forty-second.

A small python example for converting numbers to words using num2words looks like this:

>>> from num2words import num2words
>>> num2words(42)
forty-two
>>> num2words(42, ordinal=True)
forty-second

You can read more about what you can do using this module here

---

NOTE: In case somebody is wondering why this is not a code review (such as comments on the posted code), is because in the unedited question the author specifically asked if there is already a library for this.

Answer 2

You have quite a big bug there. In this part:

elif 100 <= num <= 999:
    hundreds, below_hundred = divmod(num, 100)
    tens, below_ten = divmod(below_hundred, 10)

If you have anything where the last two digits are less than 20, it's going to fail because the result is going to be 1 and 10 - that number (if you have 19, you'll get 1 and 9), which leads to a KeyError.

So, any number like 119, 315, 417 and so on will make it fail. I'd say stick with the num2words that @Dex'ter suggested or be prepared to do quite some debugging.