Comparing 2 similar strings?

[John Machin]

On Wed, 18 May 2005 15:48:32 -0400, William Park
<opengeometry at yahoo.ca> wrote:

>How do you compare 2 strings, and determine how much they are "close" to
>each other?  Eg.
>    aqwerty
>    qwertyb
>are similar to each other, except for first/last char.  But, how do I
>quantify that?
>
>I guess you can say for the above 2 strings that
>    - at max, 6 chars out of 7 are same sequence --> 85% max
>
>But, for
>    qawerty
>    qwerbty
>max correlation is
>    - 3 chars out of 7 are the same sequence --> 42% max


1. Google for such topics as "fuzzy matching", "edit distance",
"approximate comparison".

2. Closer to home, look at the thread in comp.lang.python around
2004-11-18 -- search for "Pingel Hyyro" [and yes you do mean "hyyro",
not "hydro"!!]

3. Steadfastly ignore any (presumably) well-intentioned profferings of
soundex.


HTH,
John