Well, I'd take a look at
Lingua-EN-MatchNames, first off.
from the description :
You have two databases of person records that need to be synchronized or matched up,
but they use different keys--maybe one uses SSN and the other uses employee id.
The only fields you have to match on are first and last name.
That's what this module is for.
Just feed the first and last names to the C<name_eq()> function, and it returns
C<undef> for no possible match, and a percentage of certainty (rank) otherwise.
The ranking system isn't very scientific, and gender isn't considered, though
it probably should be.
It's got some good examples, and you can set up "fuzzy searching", so you can match, e.g. "G. W. Bush, Jr" to "George Bush Jr" with a degree of confidence.
and if that doesn't work, I'd try
Text::soundex or just grepping through the strings.
