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Thesaurus - Maintains lists of associated items

• NAME
• SYNOPSIS
• DESCRIPTION
• METHODS
• AUTHOR
• SEE ALSO
• COPYRIGHT

NAME

Thesaurus - Maintains lists of associated items

SYNOPSIS

 use Thesaurus;

 $th = new Thesaurus( -files => [ 'file1', 'file2' ],
                      -ignore_case => 1 );

 @words = $th->find('vegan');

 %words = $th->find( 'animal', 'liberation' );

 foreach $word ( @{ $words{animal} } )
 {
     #something ...
 }

 $th->add_file( 'file1', 'file2' );

 $th->add( 'tofu', 'mock duck' );

 $th->delete( 'meat', 'vivisection' );

DESCRIPTION

Thesaurus is a module that allows you to create lists of related things. It was created in order to facilitate searches of a database of Chinese names in Anglicized form. Because there are various schemes to create phonetic representations of Chinese words, the following can all represent the same Chinese character:

 Woo
 Wu
 Ng

Thesaurus can be used for anything that fits into a scalar by using the new method with no parameters and then calling the add method to add data.

Thesaurus also acts as the parent class to several child classes which implement various forms of persistence for the data structure. This module can be used on its own to instantiate an object that lives for the life of its scope.

METHODS

• new( %params )
  
The new method returns a Thesaurus object. It takes the following parameters:
• ignore_case => $boolean
  
If this parameter is true, then the object will be case insensitive. It is _always_ case-preservative for its data.

• find( @items )
  

 @words = $th->find( 'Big Hat' );
 %words = $th->find( 'Big Hat', 'Faye Wong' );

The find method returns either a list or a hash, depending on context. Given a single word to find, it returns the list of words that it is associated with, including the word that was given. If no matches are found then it returns an empty list.

If it is given multiple words, it returns a hash. The keys of the has are the words given, and the keys are list references containing the associated words. If no words were found then the key has a value of 0. If none of the words match then an empty list is returned.

• add( \@list1, \@list2 )
  
The add method takes a list of list references. Each of these references should contain a set of associated scalars. Like the add files method, if an entry in the files matches an entry already in the object, then it is appended to the existing list, otherwise a new entry is created.
• delete( @items )
  
The delete method takes a list of items to delete. All the associations for the given items will be removed.
• all
  
Returns a list of array references. Each one of these list references contains one set of associations. Each association list is returned once, not once per item it contains.

AUTHOR

Dave Rolsky, <autarch@urth.org>

SEE ALSO

Thesaurus::CSV, Thesaurus::BerkeleyDB

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1999-2002 David Rolsky. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

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