Fellow Monks... maybe not a truly perl perl question... but the solution will be in Perl so I dont feel so Guilty...

So take this simple example, I have a table in my database which is full of city names which mate to IATA codes.. for instance

London = LON Miami = MIA Paris = PAR

So we have a user comes in and enters London... great so we do a select where city name = 'London'.... but then the user cunningly enters London, UK... which of course my original select wont work.... nor would any like statements..

So... maybe I use Soundex... (mysql Soundex in this case)... so I use said function... and so I check this and I get..

select soundex('London'), soundex('London, UK')

Which gives me L535 and L5352... so getting better...maybe do some comparison of first X bits ??

Then I look at user entering UK - London... Soundex not going to like that coming back with U24535...

Now I could take to the next point of no matches... so I split it... but on what ? use could enter spaces, - ',' etc etc...

Now dont get me wrong I can deal with the majority of the cases using likes, soundexs.... but maybe there is a better way ??

In reply to Matching in the Database... by ropey

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