From: Heesob Park <phasis@...>
Date: 2008-04-03T14:48:02+09:00
Subject: Re: String 'close-to' comparison.

Hi,

Kyle Hunter wrote:
> Hello, I have an array. It contains approximately twenty elements which
> are strings. I also have one string - this string was obtained using an
> OCR system. One of the strings in the array should 'match' the string
> gotten using the OCR system - unfortunately OCRs aren't perfect!
> 
> I want to take this string, and compare it to every string in the array,
> and attempt to return the closest match.
> 
> I.E.,
> array = ['Hello there, how are you?', 'What did you do over your
> break?', 'I like my coffee brown.", "I just bought a new car."]
> string = "What did you d0 over your brcak?"
> 
> 
> And then have my comparison function return array[1]. As you can see,
> string has some 'OCR errors' - it's usually 80-95% accurate, if not
> dead-on.
> 
> --
> Thanks, Kyle 'Phenax' Hunter
> http://keletech.org/blog/
Here is a simple score matching code:

array = ['Hello there, how are you?', 'What did you do over your 
break?',
   'I like my coffee brown.', 'I just bought a new car.']
string = "What did you d0 over your brcak?"

def comp(str1,str2)
  a=str1.split('').uniq
  b=str2.split('').uniq
  (a+b).uniq.length*1.0/(a.length+b.length)
end

puts array.sort_by{|x|comp(string,x)}.first

Regards,
Park Heesob
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