accented characters, SOUNDEX

[David Hood]

On 27/07/2004, at 4:06 PM, Ruslan Zasukhin wrote:

> What is soundex?
>

Soundex is a set of simple rules for identifying variations in English 
language names where the name is not spelt in a consistent way. It was 
developed for the U.S. census in the late 19th Century (well before the 
modern computer), and is still commonly used by genealogists tracing 
family histories. Some people also use it for dictionary style 
look-ups, however I would not rate it as the best tool for this task. 
Basically it codes the consonants of a word so that you can identify 
possible variations on that word which share the same code.

For more detail I'll refer people to 
http://caversham.otago.ac.nz/files/working/ctp060902.pdf which is some 
notes on phonetic matching I wrote for a project I work on. This kind 
of thing is pretty easy to implement as a function in any kind of 
database - you just have a field that stores the encoded form of the 
word.

David Hood