Can sorting Japanese kanji words be done programmatically?

Question

I\'ve recently discovered, to my astonishment (having never really thought about it before), machine-sorting Japanese proper nouns is apparently not possible.

I work

Answer 1

For Data, dig Google's Japanese IME (Mozc) data files here.

• http://mozc.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/data/

There is lots of interesting data there, including IPA dictionaries.

Edit:

And you may also try Mecab, it can use IPA dictionary and can convert kanjis to katakana for most of the words

• http://mecab.sourceforge.net/#format

and there is ruby bindings for that too.

• http://mecab.sourceforge.net/bindings.html

and here is somebody tested, ruby with mecab with tagger -Oyomi

• http://hirai2.blog129.fc2.com/blog-entry-4.html