metaphone(3)
NAME
Text::Metaphone - A modern soundex. Phonetic encoding of
words.
SYNOPSIS
use Text::Metaphone;
$phoned_words = Metaphone('Schwern');
DESCRIPTION
"Metaphone()" is a function whereby a string/word is bro
ken down into a rough approximation of its english pho
netic pronunciation. Very similar in concept and purpose
to soundex, but much more comprehensive in its approach.
FUNCTIONS
- Metaphone
- $phoned_word = Metaphone($word, $max_phone_len);
- Takes a word and encodes it according to the Metaphone
algorithm. The algorithm only deals with alphabetical
characters, all else is ignored. - If $max_phone_len is provided, Metaphone will only
encode up to that many characters for each word. - 'sh' is encoded as 'X', 'th' is encoded as '0'. This
can be changed in the metaphone.h header file.
CAVEATS
- Metaphone algorithm changes
- I have made a few minor changes to the traditional
metaphone algorithm found in the books. The most sig
nificant one is that it will differenciate between SCH
and SCHW making the former K (As in School) and the
latter sh (as in Schwartz and Schwern). - My changes can be turned off by defining the USE_TRA
DITIONAL_METAPHONE flag in metaphone.h. - Due to these changes, any users of Metaphone v1.00 or
earlier which have stored metaphonetic encodings, they
should recalculate those with the new verison.
AUTHOR
Michael G Schwern <schwern@pobox.com>
SEE ALSO
Man pages
Text::Soundex
- Books, Journals and Magazines
- Binstock, Andrew & Rex, John. "Metaphone: A Modern
Soundex." Practical Algorithms For Programmers. Read ing, Mass: Addion-Wesley, 1995 pp160-169Contains an explaination of the basic metaphone
concept & algorithm and C code from which I learned
of Metaphone and ported this module. - Parker, Gary. "A Better Phonetic Search." C Gazette,
Vol. 5, No. 4 (June/July), 1990.
This is the public-domain C version of metaphone
from which Binstock & Rex based their own.. I
haven't actually read it. - Philips, Lawrence. Computer Language, Vol. 7, No. 12
(December), 1990.
And here's the original Metaphone algorithm as pre
sented in Pick BASIC.
COPYRIGHT, et al.
- Copyright (c) 1997-1999 Michael G Schwern. All Rights
Reserved. This program is free software; you can redis
tribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl
itself.