NEILB's Blog

Three years ago I adopted Sean Burke's Lingua::EN::Numbers, as a result of reviewing CPAN modules for spelling numbers in English. Last month (May) I adopted two more of Sean's Lingua::EN:: modules, Lingua::EN::Numbers::Ordinate and Lingua::EN::Numbers::Years. Today Sean casually challenged me to add to the collection, which resulted in the first release of Lingua::EN::Fractions.

Lingua::EN::Numbers provides a function num2en, which takes a number and returns it spelled out in English words:

my $number = 263;
my $as_words = num2en($number);    # "two hundred and sixty-three"

Lingua::EN::Numbers::Years provides a function year2en, which takes a number which is interpreted as a year, and returned spelled out:

my $year     = 1984;
my $as_words = year2en($number);   # "nineteen eighty-four"

Lingua::EN::Numbers::Ordinate will convert a cardinal number to an ordinal:

my $number  = 14;
my $ordinal = ordinate($number);   # "fourteenth"

And then in email today, Sean told me ideas for additional modules, which he suggested I could "cobble together in a few minutes from the existing stuff". That was a good challenge, so tonight I cobbled together a first release of Lingua::EN::Fractions:

use Lingua::EN::Fractions qw/ fraction2words /;

my $fraction = '3/4';
my $as_words = fraction2words($fraction);   # "three quarters"

Sean was right: this is just a small amount of code that uses num2en_ordinal from Lingua::EN::Numbers. At the moment it's very basic, but I'll expand coverage, and add support for Number::Fraction.

I'm working through some Perl books at the moment, so this module is a good opportunity to try doing some things a bit differently. I wrote my first regexp using /x today!

I had my fastest-ever pull request following this post — Nick Patch fixed a typo in the doc. He also pointed out that I'm converting "-2/5" as "minus two fifths", but Americans will expect to get "negative two fifths". Need to decide what the best interface is for selecting US or UK English, or 'minus' vs 'negative'?