NAME
    Lingua::JA::Sort::ReadableKey - Sorting and Romanizing Japanese

SYNOPSIS
      use Lingua::JA::Sort::ReadableKey;
      for ( map { $_->[0] }
           sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] }
            map { [ $_, japanese_sortorder($_) ] } @utf8 ) {

DESCRIPTION
    First, does Lingua::JA::Sort::JIS do what you want? Look at that first.

    It may not do what you want if you want

    *  Kanji phrases sorted in their reading order, rather than as a
       separate block.

    *  A machine-readable or storable key so that comparisons and sorting
       can be done by a non-Japanese-aware system later.

    This module uses "Text::ChaSen" to do kanji-kana conversion, and then
    produces a comparable ASCII key for sorting.

    All text should be in "real" UTF-8 - that is, strings in Perl's internal
    format with the UTF-8 flag on.

  EXPORT
    The following methods are exported:

   kanji_to_kana
    Use ChaSen to convert a kanji sequence into hiragana. You obviously need
    to install ChaSen, and its Perl interface "Text::ChaSen" to make this
    work. You can get ChaSen from http://chasen.aist-nara.ac.jp/ and
    "Text::ChaSen" is bundled with it. If you have Debian, install the
    packages "chasen" and "libtext-chasen-perl". This code will work with
    both ChaSen1 and ChaSen2.

   japanese_pronunciation
    This turns a Japanese string into an ASCII representation of its
    reading. You can't sort on this, because Japanese don't sort according
    to the Latin alphabet, but you can use to label Japanese things for
    people who can't read Japanese. This will automatically call
    "kanji_to_kana" if necessary to get the reading of kanji strings.

   japanese_sort_order
    This returns an ASCII string which represents, in some bizarre magic
    encoding, the sort order of the Japanese input string, such that
    comparing the "japanese_sort_order" of two UTF-8 strings will tell you
    how they should be sorted in a Japanese dictionary.

    By "bizarre" and "magic", I mean that for each character, we find its
    order in the Japanese alphabet, and then replace that with
    "chr(32+$order)" so that it can be compared with "cmp".

SEE ALSO
    Lingua::JA::Sort::JIS, Text::ChaSen.

AUTHOR
    Simon Cozens, <simon@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
    Copyright (C) 2004 by Simon Cozens

    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
    under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.4 or, at
    your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.