Question

I have this quiz application where I match what people type with the right answer. For now, what I do is basically that :

if ($input =~ /$answer/i) {      print 'you won'; } 

It’s nice, as if the answer is ‘fish’ the user can type ‘a fish’ and be counted a good answer.

The problem I’m facing is that, well, my users as I are french, and I’d like to be able to accept, say, a user typing ‘taton’, and the answer being ‘tâton’.

So, what I could do, is :

use POSIX qw(locale_h); use locale; setlocale(LC_TYPE, 'fr_FR.ISO8859-15'); setlocale(LC_COLLATE, 'fr_FR.ISO8859-15'); 

And in my check routine, do a :

$input = lc($input); $input =~ tr/àáâãäåçèéêëìíîïñòóôõöùúûüýÿ/aaaaaaceeeeiiiinooooouuuuyy/; 

and something likewise with the answer.

I don’t like it, because I have to hard code things, and the day I decide I’m leaving the ISO-8859-15 world for the UTF-8 world, I’m doomed.

So, I’m looking for a way to compare strings, that will make 'tâton' eq 'taton', 'maçon' eq 'macon' or 'macon' =~ /maçon/ be true.

Answer 1

Try the Text::Unaccent module from CPAN (or Text::Unaccent::PurePerl).