Re: best method to perform operations on word lists

Thanks Bart,

Well, the issue is really a matter of pragmatism. If I do the work
manually or with some VBA macros it will take ages. The situation I am
trying to address is not so uncommon to people working on glossary
issues. Therefore I am trying to find a language-independant solution
which works, say, for 90% of the words. It won't work in situations
with irregular plurals like the one you mention (or e.g. French for
"Work/works": "Travail / travaux", German for "House/Houses":
"Haus/Häuser") or with character swaps in suffixes but at least it
would reduce substantially the number of cases to deal with.

I can define the length of a suffix with something like this:
for ($suffix=0 ; $suffix <= 1 ; $suffix++) {
or as a length difference between 2 words

I can also find out what is the root and the suffix of terms with
something like this:
$wordend = substr ($term,-$suffix);
$startposition = rindex ($term,$wordend); # position of suffix from
the end
$root = substr ($term,0,$startposition);
But for the moment I am struggling getting the value of one term and
the next one in order to compare them...Hope Dies Last !

Francois

.

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