Fuzzy string comparison

[Steve Bergman]

I'm looking for a module to do fuzzy comparison of strings.  I have 2
item master files which are supposed to be identical, but they have
thousands of records where the item numbers don't match in various
ways.  One might include a '-' or have leading zeros, or have a single
character missing, or a zero that is typed as a letter 'O'.  That kind
of thing.  These tables currently reside in a mysql database.  I was
wondering if there is a good package to let me compare strings and
return a value that is a measure of their similarity.  Kind of like
soundex but for strings that aren't words.

Thanks,
Steve Bergman