Is Perl *that* good? (was: How's ruby compare to it older brother python)

[Leif B. Kristensen]

Cameron Laird rose and spake:

> In article <iL3jc.232$Yc.2330 at news4.e.nsc.no>,
> Leif B. Kristensen <junkmail at solumslekt.org> wrote:
> .
>>getting dynamic HTML pages up and running quickly. Perl is great for
>>its string-handling abilities. (On my Web pages, I actually call a
>>Perl script from PHP precisely for this reason.)
> .
> 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.
Berthe, Birthe, Bergitte, Bergit, Birgit, Børte, Berit, and Brit, which
actually are interchangeable spellings of the same name, are reduced to
BRT.

Here's a small sample:

$str =~ s/HN/N/g;        # John --> JON
$str =~ s/TH/T/g;        # Thor --> TOR
$str =~ s/CHI/KJ/g;      # Torchild --> TORKJL
$str =~ s/CHE/KJ/g;      # Michel --> MKJL
$str =~ s/KKE/KJ/g;      # Mikkel --> MKJL
$str =~ s/KIEL/KJL/g;    # Kield -> Kjeld ( --> KJL)
$str =~ s/CH/K/g;        # Christen -> Kristen ( --> KRSTN)
$str =~ s/CA/KA/g;       # Carl -> Karl ( --> KAL)
$str =~ s/RL/L/g;        # Thorleif <=> Tollef <=> Tolf ( --> TOLF)

I use a Perl script to transform my genealogy data from a FoxPro
database to MySQL command scripts. Thanks to the excellent module
DBD::XBase by Jan Pazdziora, this is a quite simple task.

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.

regards,
-- 
Leif Biberg Kristensen
http://solumslekt.org/
Validare necesse est