replacing Chinese chars with their spellings

[Dan Jacobson]

Before I start learning python, here's what I want to do: I have a
table of Hakka Chinese words and their pronunciations.  I scan a file
and replace any Hakka ["big5" 2, 4, 6 ... byte long strings] there
with their pronunciations.  If it were just one character [two byte]
words I would use the "c2t" program.  Is there a template that munches
forth in a file and replaces the longest match in a database
before moving on?
-- 
http://jidanni.org/ Taiwan(04)25854780