Need advice on spell-checking for city names

From: Marc Bissonnette (dragnet_at_internalysis.com)
Date: 12/30/03 

Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 00:16:13 GMT

Hi all;

I'm hoping someone can point me in the direction of an FAQ or other
appropriate reading material in order to learn how to solve my problem.

I have users submitting multiple city names in a perl application and this
often results in multiple spellings, depending either on their local
dialect, mis-spellings, or copy-and-pasting from a micro$oft app.

For example, the city of Montréal has appeared as

Montréal
Montreal
MontrÈal

Or I'll get close-but-not-correct spellings, like

Ottawa (correct)
Otawa
Ottawaa
Autawa

etc.

How can I go about reducing the numbers of these incidences ? Providing
menus of all possible cities is not feasible, since there are multiple
areas within each province that each need a city list...

Many thanks in advance for insights. 

-- 
Marc Bissonnette
CGI / Database / Web Management Tools: http://www.internalysis.com
Something To Sell? Looking To Buy? http://www.whitewaterclassifieds.ca
Looking for a new ISP? http://www.canadianisp.com

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