SEEKing names that vary

[FoxGolfer]

(VFP7.0)
I'm trying to seek a value in a table that is indexed on the name field. The text file, downloaded from a website that feeds the seek statement uses variable spelling. For example, one week it has TCU, next week T.C.U; UTEP, then U.T.E.P., S. Carolina vs. South Carolina, etc. The case variation is not a problem, but the other changes are creating eof() and inaccurate data.
Any help?

Tom

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Well,
seems like you need a lookup table of seek term synonyms.

main seek terms
1 TCU
2 UTEP
3 SC

synonym seek terms
1 1 TCU
2 1 T.C.U
3 1 T.C.U.
4 2 UTEP
4 2 U.T.E.P
5 3 SC
5 3 S. Carolina
5 3 South Carolina

Now if you find U.T.E.P in the synonym seek terms you see, that you really should seek for id 2 of the main seek terms, so for UTEP.

Of course you need to manually maintain these synonyms table, but I see no automatic way to do that, even if the problem is all about US state names only, there is no simple conversion function.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[FoxGolfer]

Thanks, I didn't think of using a look-up table for a variable seek.

Tom

 

[alvechurchdata]

In the longer term it sounds as though you need to improve the quality of data entry. Can you change the web site so that the user selects from a dropdown list rather than typing in freely?

Geoff Franklin

http://www.alvechurchdata.co.uk

 

[FoxGolfer]

Nope, it's a cut and paste from an uncontrolled website.

Thanks,

Tom

 

[alvechurchdata]

Nope

Sounds like you've got some interesting coding ahead of you.

Geoff Franklin

http://www.alvechurchdata.co.uk

 

[michaelrc0]

Interesting problem can you give more examples, the ones you give are easy fixes, converting state variations (only 50), the other example could be handled by stripping the puncuation.


Michael C

 

[FoxGolfer]

Michael,
Thanks for your response. That project was cancelled. Initially I did punctuation stripping but it was more than that; it was variations of every conceivable spelling and abbreviations of states.

Tom