NAME

       Lingua::EN::Words2Nums - convert English text to numbers

SYNOPSIS

        use Lingua::EN::Words2Nums;
        $num=words2nums("two thousand and one");
        $num=words2nums("twenty-second");
        $num=words2nums("15 billion, 6 million, and ninteen");

DESCRIPTION

       This module converts English text into numbers. It supports both ordinal and cardinal
       numbers, negative numbers, and very large numbers.

       The main subroutine, which is exported by default, is words2nums(). This subroutine, when
       fed a string, will attempt to convert it into a number.  If it succeeds, the number will
       be returned. If it fails, it returns undef.

VARIABLES

       There are a number of variables that can be used to tweak the behavior of this module. For
       example, debugging can be be enabled by setting $Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::debug=1

       $Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::debug
           Default: 0. If set to a true value, outputs on standard error some useful messages if
           parsing fails for some reason.

       $Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::billion
           Default: 10 ** 9. This is the number that will be returned for "one billion".  It
           defaults to the American version; the English will want to set it to 10 ** 12. Setting
           this number automatically changes all the larger numbers (trillion, quadrillion, etc)
           to match.

NOTES

       It does not understand decimals or fractions, yet.

       Scores are supported, eg: "four score and ten". So are dozens. So is a baker's dozen. And
       a gross.

       Various mispellings of numbers are understood.

       While it handles googol correctly, googolplex is too large to fit in perl's standard
       scalar type, and "inf" will be returned.

AUTHOR

       Copyright 2001-2003 Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>

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