Cameron Laird rose and spake:
.
I hear this more often than I understand it. Perl certainly
does support many string-oriented operations. What's a speci-
fic example, though, of an action you feel more comfortable
coding in external Perl? I suspect there's something I need
to learn about PHP's deficiencies, or Perl's power.
I'm glad that you asked
The routine is for a phonetic search in Norwegian 18th century names,
which can be spelled in an amazing number of different ways. As I found
that the Soundex algorithm was useless for Norwegian spellings, I
invented my own. It's not really an algorithm, but a series of
substitutions that reduces names to a kind of primitives. Thus, eg.....
Here's a small sample:
$str =~ s/HN/N/g; # John --> JON
$str =~ s/TH/T/g; # Thor --> TOR ....
>
[snip]
In theory, the web routine for phonetic searches might have been
implemented in PHP. The trouble with that is that I would have to
maintain both a PHP and a Perl version of the same routine. I find it
much easier to just copy and paste the whole mess (at present about 120
lines) between the encoding and the decoding routines in Perl, and run
an exec("perl norphon.pl $name") from PHP.