[New-bugs-announce] [issue46086] Add ratio_min() function to the difflib library

[Giacomo]

New submission from Giacomo <baldogiacomophd at gmail.com>:

Here I propose a new function, namely .ratio_min(self,m). 

.ratio_min(self,m) is an extension of the difflib's function .ratio(self). Equivalently to .ratio(self), .ratio_min(self,m) returns a measure of two sequences' similarity (float in [0,1]). In addition to .ratio(), it can ignore matched substrings if these substrings have length less than a given threshold m. m is the second variable of the function. 

It is very useful to avoid spurious high similarity scores. 

    # NEW FUNCTION: 

    def ratio_min(self,m):
        """Return a measure of the sequences' similarity (float in [0,1]).
        Where T is the total number of elements in both sequences, and
        M_min is the number of matches with every single match has length at least m, this is 2.0*M_min / T.
        Note that this is 1 if the sequences are identical, and 0 if
        they have no substring of length m or more in common.
        .ratio_min() is similar to .ratio(). 
        .ratio_min(1) is equivalent to .ratio().
        
        >>> s = SequenceMatcher(None, "abcd", "bcde")
        >>> s.ratio_min(1)
        0.75
        >>> s.ratio_min(2)
        0.75
        >>> s.ratio_min(3)
        0.75
        >>> s.ratio_min(4)
        0.0
        """

        matches = sum(triple[-1] for triple in self.get_matching_blocks() if triple[-1] >=m)
        return _calculate_ratio(matches, len(self.a) + len(self.b))

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 408622
nosy: gibu
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Add ratio_min() function to the difflib library
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.10, Python 3.11

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue46086>
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