Pig Latin Converter

Pig Latin is a kid game with surprisingly fiddly rules — words starting with consonants move the consonant cluster to the end and add "ay"; words starting with vowels just add "way" or "yay" depending on the dialect; "y" sometimes counts as a vowel, sometimes as a consonant. Doing it by hand for a paragraph of text gets tedious by the third word.

Paste English text and the converter outputs Pig Latin word-by-word, preserving punctuation and capitalization. The reverse direction works too, with the caveat that some Pig Latin → English conversions are ambiguous (the original consonant cluster can't always be uniquely recovered from the suffix-shifted form).

Mostly used as a coding exercise example, in early programming tutorials, or for occasional childhood-nostalgia purposes. The implementation here uses the most common ruleset — consonant cluster to the end + "ay", vowel-initial gets "way" — which matches what most American kids learned.

Pig Latin's actual rules vary by region and tradition more than most people realize. The dominant American version moves the initial consonant cluster (everything before the first vowel) to the end and adds "ay": "scram" → "amscray", "trash" → "ashtray". Words starting with vowels get "way" or "yay" appended: "elephant" → "elephantway" or "elephantyay". The y treatment varies — "yellow" might be "ellowyay" (y as consonant) or "yellowway" (y as vowel, treated like initial-vowel rule). Cockney rhyming slang and other adult-language games are sometimes loosely called "Pig Latin" but follow entirely different rules.

Worked example: input "Hello world friend". Output "Ellohay orldway iendfray". Note the cluster handling — "fr" in "friend" moved as a unit, not letter by letter. Capitalization moves to whatever ends up first in the output (E in Ellohay, capitalized), with the original first letter lowercased. Punctuation stays attached to the word it was on. Reversing back to English is mostly possible but ambiguous in edge cases — "amscray" could decode to "scram" or to "scra" + something else if the rules were applied loosely.

The limit is that Pig Latin isn't a real language, so it doesn't have an authoritative spec. Implementations vary in their handling of: words starting with "qu" (treat as one cluster?), words with no vowels (rare but exist), proper nouns, contractions ("don't" → ?), and hyphenated compound words. The converter follows the most common American conventions but won't match every variant kids learned. If your version sounds different, that's the regional variation, not a bug.

What Pig Latin is genuinely useful for: it appears as a programming exercise in introductory courses precisely because the rules are simple but require string manipulation that catches common student errors. Beyond pedagogy, it's a curiosity, a kid-secret-language nostalgia object, and occasionally a coding challenge in technical interviews. The converter exists for completeness more than for utility — most people who type "pig latin" into a search bar are exploring rather than performing serious work.