Counting elements in a list wildcard

[Iain King]

John Machin wrote:
> 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.

snip

> > steven = re.compile("Ste(v|ph|f)(e|a)n")
>
> What about Steffan, Etienne, Esteban, István, ... ?
>

well, obviously these could be included:
"(Ste(v|ph|f)(e|a)n|Steffan|Etienne|Esteban)", but the OP never said he
wanted to translate anything into another language.  He just wanted to
catch variable spellings.

> > 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.

Iain