NAME

Lingua::EN::Words2Nums - convert English text to numbers

SYNOPSIS

use Lingua::EN::Words2Nums;
$num=words2nums("one thousand and one");
$num=words2nums("twenty-second");
$num=words2nums("15 billion, 6 million, and ninteen");

DESCRIPTION

This module converts English text into numbers. It supports both ordinal and cardinal numbers, negative numbers, and numbers larger than one billion.

The main subroutine, which is exported by default, is words2nums(). This subroutine, when fed a string, will attempt to convert it into a number. If it succeeds, the number will be returned. If it fails, it returns undef.

VARIABLES

There are a number of variables that can be used to tweak the behavior of this module. For example, debugging can be be enabled by setting $Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::debug=1

$Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::debug

Default: 0. If set to a true value, outputs on standard error some useful messages if parsing fails for some reason.

$Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::million

Default: 10 ** 9. This is the number that will be returned for "one million". It defaults to the American version; the English will want to set it to 10 ** 12.

NOTES

It does not understand decimals or fractions, yet.

It happens that it can do some simple math such as "fourteen minus five", but don't count on that working in the future.

Scores are supported, eg: "four score and ten". So are dozens. So is a baker's dozen. And a gross.

Various mispellings of numbers are understood.

AUTHOR

Copyright © 2001 Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.