Use the standard Text::Soundex module distributed with Perl. Before you do so, you may want to determine whether `soundex' is in fact what you think it is. Knuth's soundex algorithm compresses words into a small space, and so it does not necessarily distinguish between two words which you might want to appear separately. For example, the last names `Knuth' and `Kant' are both mapped to the soundex code K530. If Text::Soundex does not do what you are looking for, you might want to consider the String::Approx module available at CPAN.