Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!maccs!cs4g6ag From: cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer Subject: Re: Soundex Message-ID: <2622BA4B.262@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> Date: 11 Apr 90 05:02:03 GMT References: <23832@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Organization: McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario Lines: 22 Well, being a good computer science student, I feel obliged to point out that this algorithm, like so many others, is in one of Donald Knuth's _The Art Of Computer Programming_ books, specifically the one on Searching and Sorting algorithms. You should be able to find it in your campus library system. I'm sure there are many other books with the soundex algorithm, or similar, in them, but I _have_ to mention Knuth on the net at least once before I graduate :-) For those not familiar with soundex, it takes a word and transforms it into another representation with vowels and double letters removed, and with the remaining letters converted into codes so that letters which have similar sounds (e.g. m and n, or t and d) end up with the same code. Well, that's an approximate description of it, but it's enough to give an idea of how it works. Note that it assumes that words you feed it are from the English language; for foreign words, it often doesn't work quite as well as you would like it to. -- More half-baked ideas from the oven of: **************************************************************************** Stephen M. Dunn cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca = "\nI'm only an undergraduate ... for now!\n";