Reversing a soundex result

Hi everyone,
Hope you can help me with this one. Given a soundex value like:
"M500" how can you tell what the original value was as a charcter
string? In other words, how can you go back? (inside query analyzer')
SELECT soundex('help') = H410
but if I was given H410 - how do I determine the string'
Comments/suggestions/code samples much appreciated...
Alalmurph@.altavista.com wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> Hope you can help me with this one. Given a soundex value like:
> "M500" how can you tell what the original value was as a charcter
> string? In other words, how can you go back? (inside query analyzer')
> SELECT soundex('help') = H410
> but if I was given H410 - how do I determine the string'
>
> Comments/suggestions/code samples much appreciated...
> Al
You can't. It's a one-way algorithm since different character strings
can be represented by the same SOUNDEX value.
What is the problem you are trying to solve?
David Gugick - SQL Server MVP
Quest Software