I asked the MySQL folks, and they pointed me to Soundex, but it didn't look that easy to implement, and I've heard bad things about the pattern matching.
Soundex is easy to implement (or get it from CPAN: Text::Soundex), but you're right in that it's a long way from being perfect
Unless I state otherwise, my code all runs with strict and warnings

In reply to Re: Comparing inputs before inserting into MySQL for "sounds-like" similarity by FunkyMonk
in thread Comparing inputs before inserting into MySQL for "sounds-like" similarity by hacker

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