NAME

       Text::Metaphone - A modern soundex.  Phonetic encoding of words.

SYNOPSIS

         use Text::Metaphone;

         # XWRN
         my $phoned_word = Metaphone('Schwern');

DESCRIPTION

       "Metaphone()" is a function whereby a string/word is broken down into a rough
       approximation of its english phonetic 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 significant 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_TRADITIONAL_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 version.

AUTHOR

       Michael G Schwern <schwern@pobox.com>

SEE ALSO

   Man pages
       Text::Soundex - A simpler word hashing algorithm Text::DoubleMetaphone - Improved
       metaphone Text::Phonetic - A collection of phonetic algorithms

   Books, Journals and Magazines
       Binstock, Andrew & Rex, John. "Metaphone:  A Modern Soundex." Practical Algorithms For
       Programmers.  Reading, Mass:  Addion-Wesley, 1995  pp160-169

       Contains an explanation 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 presented in Pick BASIC.

COPYRIGHT and LICENSE

       Copyright (c) 1997, 1999, 2007-2008 Michael G Schwern.  All Rights Reserved.

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
       terms as Perl itself.