Counting elements in a list wildcard

[John Machin]

On 25/04/2006 6:26 PM, Iain King wrote:
> hawkesed wrote:
>> If I have a list, say of names. And I want to count all the people
>> named, say, Susie, but I don't care exactly how they spell it (ie,
>> Susy, Susi, Susie all work.) how would I do this? Set up a regular
>> expression inside the count? Is there a wildcard variable I can use?
>> Here is the code for the non-fuzzy way:
>> lstNames.count("Susie")
>> Any ideas? Is this something you wouldn't expect count to do?
>> Thanks y'all from a newbie.
>> Ed
> 
> Dare I suggest using REs?  This looks like something they'de be good
> for:
> 
> import re
> 
> def countMatches(names, namePattern):
>   count = 0
>   for name in names:
>     if namePattern.match(name):
>       count += 1
>   return count
> 
> susie = re.compile("Su(s|z)(i|ie|y)")
> 
> print countMatches(["John", "Suzy", "Peter", "Steven", "Susie",
> "Susi"], susie)
> 
> 
> some other patters:
> 
> iain = re.compile("(Ia(i)?n|Eoin)")
> steven = re.compile("Ste(v|ph|f)(e|a)n")

What about Steffan, Etienne, Esteban, István, ... ?

> john = re.compile("Jo(h)?n")
> 

IMHO, the amount of hand-crafting that goes into a *general-purpose* 
phonetic matching algorithm is already bordering on overkill. Your 
method using REs would not appear to scale well at all.