Soundex

Soundex is an algorithm for determening how similar two strings are phonetically. The "official" Soundex algorithm encodes any word into four bytes and the result of such a Soundex function is a number telling how similar the two words compared are. The variants I have come across have been opted for English so I have often found it worth the while to roll my own phonetic matching functions to work with Swedish. My own functions have always been table driven so that any irregularities can be dealt with. -- PEZ