From: Farrel Lifson <farrel.lifson@...>
Date: 2006-08-01T15:46:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Detecting similar strings

On 01/08/06, Farrel Lifson <farrel.lifson@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

And here is a nice description of the Levenstein Distance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

Farrel