Soundex/Extended Soundex/Metaphone Algorithms?

[ssteinke]

I've been thinking about possibly adding an intelligent "sounds like" facility to my application, allowing the user to receive matches to similarly sounding names. I've looked around and haven't been able to find the code for the metaphone option, which seems to be what I want to use.

Before I get too far into it, does anyone have any experience using any of these algorithms, and possibly some code?

Scott

 

[izyrider]

Scott

here's something to get you started - a simple demo of sort-of-soundex for A2K. i had to kill the all the names in the table since they were real people. add a few thousand names to the table and experiment.

attached is a DEMO!
it is not optimised for anything other than clarity.
it is neither metaphone nor standard soundex.
...my modifs should be obvious to you from the code: frankly, i prefer it my way, but you should have no problems switching back to standard soundex.

all the demo is trying to show is one way to construct a sort-of-soundex code for a bunch of names. the demo uses a VBA function in a query to create the code - with a big table you might want to consider breaking normalisation rules and saving the sort-of-soundex key in the table (original demo did this as you can see from the table structure)

izy

 

[ssteinke]

Thanks for the reply izy... i'll give your code a look and see what she can do, but your initial observation intrigues me about whether to hold the codes in the table, or compute them on the fly. Although outside the rules of normalization, what is standard 'cookie-cutter' for this stuff. It seems to me that it would run much faster if the computations were done pre-lookup.

Also, do you have any experience with Metaphone or Double Metaphone. I've been doing some reading and these two keep coming up as 'replacements' to the original soundex. Thanks again for the sample.

Scott