Hi all, This is the 2nd posting wrt the Namibian languages project. As you may suspect languages with tones, clicks and other "exotic" objects present challenges for coding and collating. These challenges have been overcome but it would be nice if the solutions were doable in openoffice.
Words in Nama and Khoe are encoded such that each "phoneme" consists of one character. These are done in a largely mnemonic way so that normal humans can enter these forms with a reasonable degree of accuracy. The challenge comes when it time to alphabetise these forms. The easy way is to do a character-by-character mapping from the spelling to a code that can then be sorted on and giving the correct alphabetical order for these languages. The coded version could be in a non-printing column so that the word in its conventional spelling would appear in the appropriate position in a printed or webbed version of the dictionary. I have looked through OO's built in functions and while SUBSTITUTE and REPLACE come close, neither of them seem to do the character mapping that I need. Concretely, I'm looking for a function map(text, string1, string2) that returns a text where the nth character in string1 is replaced by the nth character of string2. If OO doesn't have this function, it might be a useful one to add. Alternatively, since, say, the Icon Programming language can do this trivially having a built-in function "map" that does just that, it is possible to issue a system call from OO that could execute a tiny program (supplied by the user) and that takes cell1 as its input and inserts the result in cell2? As I said in my previous posting, much gratitude for any suggestions. Cheers, Jonathan -- Registerd Linux user #445917 at http://counter.li.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
