Advanced texts processing - Converting a word in a text to numbers - VBA Creativity §9
This is one of the films in a sub category dedicated to text processing in Arabic language. The final goal is to raise the level of intelligence for the machine when dealing with new texts similar (but not exactly matching) pre-entered texts in a database.
It's well known to those who manage databases consisting of Arabic texts that uses differ significantly between each other when dealing with some spelling rules, like 'Alif Hamza' and 'Ta' Marboota' and the like. This fact leads to problems in data consistency and may cause multiple entries for the same information, which can destroy the value of statistical reports later.
In this situation, developers have two main choices: 1) is to define the right spelling rules to all users and oblige them to obey these rules no matter what! This approach is NOT practical especially when dealing with working environment that often changes database users, and impossible when dealing with online users for a web application. 2) is to manipulate texts using code.
Every one knows that it's difficult to make a numerical comparison between letters, unless they are converted to numbers, so I developed myself a bunch of procedures to handle this task. Arabic Letters would be converted to numerical strings according to some rules to achieve this goal.
In other terms, now, it is possible to make assessment for new texts to decide whether they are the same (and NOT necessarily exact) of some other pre-known text.
This technology fixes a huge problem in databases and systems that concerns Arabic texts and helps data managers keep a well structured database, fully consistent and organized. In other words, it saves a lot of head ache.
The function explained in this film is only one among other procedures related to this technology, and the prototype achieved (in primary tests) a success rate exceeded 99 %.
The good news is that such technology can be easily implemented with other languages! It only needs to sort letters according to their use rate.
This is a tutorial within a series focusing on developing software packages within VBA environment to be available for your system, made by Microsoft Access.
The film includes a full function and explains how to write its programming lines step by step. It also shows you a systematic reasoning to reach the desired result.
I hope you take advantage of it, and generally, with these films in the series.