From: Erik Veenstra <erikveen@...>
Date: 2008-07-09T02:03:38+09:00
Subject: Re: String matching/comparing, statistical similarity

> Second thing I thought of, maybe there's a way in Ruby to
> compare strings and get back a percentage of how similar the
> strings are?

There's a very fast C-implementation of the Levenshtein
distance. This module has two methods, of which one is called
normalized_distance. It does exactly what you mentioned:

 Levenshtein.normalized_distance(s1, s2, threshold=nil)

Download and documentation:

 $ gem install levenshtein

 http://rubyforge.org/projects/levenshtein/
 http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/levenshtein/doc/index.html

gegroet,
Erik V. - http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/