Hi Thomas,


>Compare all names and give suspected last names higher points if matching.
>Especially helpful if one encounters names only added to in marriage with former name,
>Helen Müller is later known as Helen Mueller-Luedenscheid if second name comes after marriage from a source using English keyboards and you do not want to normalize "ü" before comparison (still recommended)

1) Would you do this via parsing out the lastname into words and then doing a substring search via the $ operator on each word? In that case, it is not optimizable.

>For time-consuming but extremly helpful glossing over small errors in spelling, do the comparison via Levenshtein.

2) Levenshtein - is this available natively in VFP or is it 3rd party (or a Win dll)?

I am also using a "soundex" like function call to the old PhdBase library. But even it does not find a match when searching for "J. David" (firstname) on field "David".

Albert