From: Farrel Lifson <farrel.lifson@...>
Date: 2006-08-01T15:42:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Detecting similar strings

On 01/08/06, Dylan Markow <dylan@dylanmarkow.com> wrote:
> Is there a way to take two strings, and decide if they are "similar."
> I'm creating a contact system in Rails, and am having a large problem
> with my users punching in duplicate entries with the last names spelled
> slightly different.
>
> Is there a way to check if 2 strings are "identical" up to a certain
> percentage, such as only having 1 or 2 characters different?

Here's a Perl module that does something similar. You might try
porting it over to Ruby.
http://search.cpan.org/~mlehmann/String-Similarity-1.02/Similarity.pm

Farrel