The primary function of phdbase was not phonetic searching, but rather full-text indexing and searching. However, you are right in that it also enabled developers to perform phonetic searches on the text.
Are you trying to perform phonetic searches on text inside larger text passages (e.g. memo fields), or on whole text fields (e.g. people's names)? If you do not need the full-text functionality, then you should take a look at the SOUNDEX() and DIFFERENCE() functions. I should mention that do not have much experience with these, but I did hear that the algorithms they use are not ideal. Another possibility would be for you to write you own function. For this you may want to take a look at
http://www.creativyst.com/Doc/Articles/SoundEx1/SoundEx1.htm.
FoxWeb Support Team
support@foxweb.com email |
Sent by Rod on 01/29/2011 09:50:28 AM:
Several years ago we used a library called PHDBASE.PLB within Fox 2.6 to do a little trick that was then called fuzzy logic with names in a database. It scored names phonetically so that we could evaluate and detect names like Smith, Smyth and Smythe that sound alike but are spelled differently. It worked well for names like O'Conner, O' Conner, OConner and even Conner or MacDonald, MC Donald etc.
Unfortunately Fox 2.6 doesn't seem to run on our new virtual servers running
Windows 2008 and the PHDBASE library doesn't seem to work with any FoxPro version from 6.0 forward.
Does FoxWeb have the capability to generate a numeric score based on phonetics or some other method that could help us detect such sound alikes?