---
name: "Lingua::EN::Words2Nums"
section: "3pm"
platform: "linux"
package: "liblingua-en-words2nums-perl"
version: "0.19-4"
release: "Debian 13 (Trixie)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/Lingua::EN::Words2Nums"
---

# Lingua::EN::Words2Nums(3pm)

convert English text to numbers

## NAME

Lingua::EN::Words2Nums - convert English text to numbers

## SYNOPSIS

```
 use Lingua::EN::Words2Nums;
 $num=words2nums("two thousand and one");
 $num=words2nums("twenty-second");
 $num=words2nums("15 billion, 6 million, and ninteen");
```

## DESCRIPTION

This module converts English text into numbers. It supports both ordinal and cardinal numbers, negative numbers, and very large numbers.

The main subroutine, which is exported by default, is **words2nums()**. This subroutine, when fed a string, will attempt to convert it into a number. If it succeeds, the number will be returned. If it fails, it returns undef.

## VARIABLES

There are a number of variables that can be used to tweak the behavior of this module. For example, debugging can be be enabled by setting `$Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::debug`=1

- $Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::debug

  Default: 0. If set to a true value, outputs on standard error some useful messages if parsing fails for some reason.

- $Lingua::EN::Words2Nums::billion

  Default: 10 \*\* 9. This is the number that will be returned for "one billion". It defaults to the American version; the English will want to set it to 10 \*\* 12. Setting this number automatically changes all the larger numbers (trillion, quadrillion, etc) to match.

## NOTES

It does not understand decimals or fractions, yet.

Scores are supported, eg: "four score and ten". So are dozens. So is a baker's dozen. And a gross.

Various mispellings of numbers are understood.

While it handles googol correctly, googolplex is too large to fit in perl's standard scalar type, and "inf" will be returned.

## AUTHOR

Copyright 2001-2003 Joey Hess \<joey@kitenet.net\>

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.