http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1082376

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello

As the title suggests, I'm looking for a module which converts various English shortcuts like we're into we are, I'm into I am, etc...

I couldn't find any module in CPAN which does this. Maybe I haven't looked for the right name.
So my question is: did anyone worked with something similar before? What module would you recommend for doing this?

Thanks

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Re: Lingua: Transform "wasn't" into "was not"
by toolic (Bishop) on Apr 15, 2014 at 18:29 UTC
    It looks like Lingua::EN::Contraction performs the inverse of the operation you want. I didn't see an "expand" version of this on CPAN. Check the source code to see if it might be feasible to modify for your purposes.
[reply]

      Thank you. Lingua::EN::Contraction is good enough for for my purpose.
      (My work consists in comparing two English sentences and check if they are the same, but first I needed to normalize them, so this module does this, which is more than OK)

      Maybe the inverse ("what's" to "what is") is not possible because there are some words like person's which doesn't (always) mean person is.
      (I'm not a native English speaker, so I may be wrong about this)

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        It's not just the confusability between "possessive 's vs. contracted 's", but also confusability between "'s contracted from is vs. 's contracted from has" -- for example:
        • John's father is old. (possessive)
        • John's old. (contracted from "John is")
        • John's been sick. (contracted from "John has")
        There's also some possible ambiguity with 'd, although this is relatively rare:
        • He'd never done that before. (contracted from "He had")
        • He'd never do that again. (contracted from "He would")

        Apart from those cases, every other English contraction has a distinct full form.

        If you're just trying to see whether two strings are identical except for contracted vs. uncontracted forms, it should work if you normalize both strings by applying contraction wherever possible, then seeing if they match.

        I suppose there's a way to do it by expanding the contractions instead, but that's a lot more complicated.

[reply]
        person's which doesn't (always) mean person is.
        You are correct. The following 2 sentences are equivalent: 
        That person's code smells.
The code of that person smells.

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