Words2Nums(3)

🦋 Lingua::EN::Words2Nums — Words2Nums(3) 🦋

okay bestie, welcome to the User Contributed Perl Documentation page for Lingua::EN::Words2Nums — manual name Words2Nums(3) 💅. This one is lowkey iconic: it takes English text and turns it into numbers, and it’s giving “math but make it text” ✨.

---

💖 NAME 💖

Lingua::EN::Words2Nums — convert English text to numbers 💖

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

use Lingua::EN::Words2Nums;
$num=words2nums("two thousand and one");
$num=words2nums("twenty-second");
$num=words2nums("15 billion, 6 million, and nintee");

🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

This module converts English text into numbers. It supports both ordinal and cardinal numbers, negative numbers, and very large numbers. Periodt. 💅

The main subroutine, which is exported by default, is words2nums(). Feed it a string and it will attempt to convert it into a number. If it succeeds, the number will be returned. If it fails, it returns undef — no cap, that’s the deal 😭.

🎀 VARIABLES 🎀

There are a number of variables that can be used to tweak the behavior of this module. For example, debugging can be enabled by setting $Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::debug=1 👀. These are your lil’ knobs, bestie:

• $Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::debug — Default: 0. If set to a true value, outputs on standard error some useful messages if parsing fails for some reason. So when parsing is doing a whole mystery era, this tells you what’s up 🔍.
• $Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::billion — Default: 10 ** 9. This is the number that will be returned for "one billion". It defaults to the American version; the English will want to set it to 10 ** 12. Setting this number automatically changes all the larger numbers (trillion, quadrillion, etc) to match. Big-number behavior? Automatically upgraded 💫.

🧚 NOTES 🧚

vibe check on the edge cases:

• It does not understand decimals or fractions, yet. 😭 That’s the whole note; don’t come for me.
• Scores are supported, eg: "four score and ten". So are dozens. So is a baker’s dozen. And a gross. Math with range, honestly 💯.
• Various mispellings of numbers are understood. 🫶 It’s forgiving like that.
• While it handles googol correctly, googolplex is too large to fit in perl's standard scalar type, and "inf" will be returned. 💀 That’s the limit, bestie.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Copyright 2001-2003 Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> 💌

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. 🫶

mwah 💋 — this page’s source/version is perl v5.42.0, its date is 2014-12-02, and the manual is Words2Nums(3). Byeeee ✨