NAME

Lingua::JA::Romaji::Valid - see if the string is valid romanization

SYNOPSIS

    use Lingua::JA::Romaji::Valid;
    my $validator = Lingua::JA::Romaji::Valid->new('liberal');

    # this is valid romanization of 'violin'
    $validator->as_romaji('vaiorin');  # true

    # but this is not valid for a (common) Japanese name
    # as we don't use 'v' for our name, at least usually.
    $validator->as_name('vaiorin');    # false

DESCRIPTION

This module tells you if the given string looks like valid romanization of Japanese words or not. It may be useful when you want to pick up Japanese persons from a list of persons from various countries.

Note that, even if this module tells you the word looks like valid romanization, the word is not always Japanese. (Among others, Italian nouns with lots of vowels tend to be judged valid.)

And vice versa. Though there're several ways of romanization, this module ignores lots of their minor rules to increase general reliability. So sometimes even your registered name might be judged invalid, especially if it is rather, eh, untraditional one.

METHODS

new

creates a validator object. You can specify which rule you want to use through an alias, or a basename of the rule package (::Rule::<Basename>). See also 'aliases' below.

as_romaji

sees if the word is valid romanization or not.

as_name

sees if the word is valid as a name of a Japanese person. Usually we don't use "v" or "che", to name a few.

as_fullname

sees if the word is valid as a full name of a Japanese person. A Japanese person has both first and last names, but doesn't have a middle name.

aliases

returns all the aliases available, i.e.:

  liberal       => Liberal
  loose         => ISO3602Loose (default)
  kunrei        => ISO3602
  japanese      => ISO3602Strict
  traditional   => Hepburn
  hepburn       => HepburnRevised
  international => HepburnRevisedInternational
  railway       => HepburnRailway
  passport      => HepburnPassport

verbose

if set to true, the validator spits warnings when it encounters broken or banned kana expressions.

AUTHOR

Kenichi Ishigaki, <ishigaki at cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2007 by Kenichi Ishigaki.

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