From: "Alexandru E. Ungur" <alexandru@...>
Date: 2006-08-01T16:22:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Detecting similar strings

>>> sender: "Dylan Markow" date: "Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 03:25:59PM +0900" <<<EOQ
> 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?
Looks like there is a soundex implementation for Ruby:
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/search.rhtml?search=soundex

If by any chance you are using MySQL you could use the soundex function
builtin into it as well.

Good luck,
Alex