Phonetic GREL function should raise an error

[wetneb]

The phonetic GREL function does not validate its second argument, the phonetic encoding, and silently falls back to metaphone.

For instance, "open refine".phonetic("metaphone3") evaluates to "APNRFN" and so does "open refine".phonetic(undefined_value) or "open refine".phonetic(null).

In these last two cases, we should instead throw an error, similar to the one we get with "open refine".phonetic("invalid_encoding") (Error: phonetic doesn't know how to handle the 'invalid encoding' encoding.).

[rachittiwari8562]

I think the error thrown should be "phonetic expects second argument to be a string" because if we make a call to "open refine".photenic(soundex) the soundex argument is translated to null object so the error should be to that a string argument is expected.

[rachittiwari8562]

I have looked into this issue and found that if second argument is a string or character without " " then the object corresponding to argument is treated as null and in file OpenRefine/main/src/com/google/refine/expr/functions/strings/Phonetic.java there is no else case for handling this.

[wetneb]

That sounds like you identified the bug here!

[rachittiwari8562]

The first was accidentaly done so please ignore it.