This humble, less-than-nothing monk would suggest that perhaps the original poster wishes to search the database directly with wildcarding, rather than search some database output with Perl. As much as I enjoy working with Perl, a database-based solution would likely perform better.

Oracle and MySQL have soundex functions. Postgres seems to also, as part of their fuzzystrmatch function. If your client uses Oracle and expects to do this a lot, Oracle provides function-based indices which could precompute each row's soundex value for faster response times.

Of course soundex only helps with similar words, not with related words (e.g., "boys" and "boysenberry" are similar, while "boys" and "girls" are related). The thesaurus reference sounds like a good idea in that regard.

I've had occasion to use Perl's soundex function and it works quite well, although there's some performance penalty due to the additional function calls.

In reply to Where should the solution be applied? by Anonymous Monk
in thread Module to provide suggested terms for search? by punch_card_don

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.