I don't know about matching gray with silver, or even 5's and s's, but one little-used feature of R:Base is its implementation of the SOUNDEX "sounds like" algorithm in WHERE conditions.
in the concomp database, try SEL * FROM contacts WHERE contlname SOUNDS 'petersen' SEL * FROM contacts WHERE contlname SOUNDS 'balee' The algorith forces you to get the first consonant right, I think, but then substitutes just about any vowel for vowel, and knows about lots of homophonic combinations, like K and C, or PH and F, and guesses on that basis. For the 5's and S's, you could conceivably fiddle with the colating tables (that affect sort order) in your cfg file. That could make ones sort like ells, and zeros sort like ohs, and fives sort like esses. Bill On Tue, 08 Jul 2003 16:25:26 -0400, Dennis Fleming wrote: >I think this is a Father of RBase question, but I'm not sure. I recall that >Wayne built some s/w for the police but I don't remember what it did. In >our community here I offered (pro bono) to set up a vehicle ID system so >when folks misbehave and public safety gets a call with a partial vehicle >description, they can quickly match it up. The standard search is easy. >What I was wondering is if anyone knows of a similar color, number, letter >search. Silver would also look for gray, 5's & S's, Ohs and zeros, etc. >I suspect there is even a similar make/model table out there somewhere.
