NAME
Text::Abbreviate - Perl extension for text abbreviations and ambiguities
SYNOPSIS
use Text::Abbreviate;
my @cmds = qw( help load list quit query save stop );
my $abbr = Text::Abbreviate->new(\%OPTS, @cmds);
while (my $c = <STDIN>) {
chomp $c;
my @full = $abbr->expand($c);
if (@full == 0) {
print "Command '$c' could not be found.\n";
}
elsif (@full > 1) {
print "Command '$c' ambiguous; choose from [@full]\n";
}
else {
print "Command $full[0] selected.\n";
}
}
DESCRIPTION
Text::Abbreviate takes a list of words (most commonly, commands for a
user interface) and provides a means for you to expand an abbreviation
of one of them into the full word. In the case that such an expansion is
ambiguous ('qu' in the code above is ambiguous, because it could expand
to 'quit' or 'query'), all expansions are returned.
Case Folding
You can turn case folding on and off with the folding() method; you can
also set it during the creation of the object, by passing a hash
reference as the first argument:
my $abbr = Text::Abbreviate->new({fold => 1}, @words);
Case folding (that is, case insensitivity) is off by default ("{fold ="
0}>). To change the setting later on, use the folding() method:
$abbr->folding(1); # make case insensitive
$abbr->folding(0); # make case sensitive
$state = $abbr->folding; # get state (true/false)
Unambiguous Abbreviations
You can retrieve a hash of the unambiguous abbreviations of each word
with the unambiguous() method:
my %abbrevs = $abbr->unambiguous; # hash
my $abbrev_ref = $abbr->unambiguous; # hash ref
The keys are the full words themselves, and the values are array
references holding the abbreviations in order of length (smallest
first). Thus, for any word $w, the shortest unambiguous abbreviation for
it is "$abbrevs{$w}[0]". CAVEAT: each word is included in the value set,
even if the entirety of the word is still ambiguous. Specifically, if
the words "here" and "heresy" are both in the word list, unambiguous()
will return a hash that includes these key-value pairs:
here => ['here'],
heresy => ['heres', 'heresy'],
This is almost a replication of Text::Abbrev except that the hash is
inverted. (The caveat is replicated as well!)
SEE ALSO
Text::Abbrev in the Perl core.
AUTHOR
Jeff Pinyan, <
[email protected]>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2006 by Jeff "japhy" Pinyan
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.6.0 or, at
your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.
