At 02:02 PM 26/1/95 EST, Jeff Kell wrote:
>Does anyone have, know of, or have source code for a "fuzzy" string
>match?  Not just a phonetic key (Soundex), but rather one which could
>tell you "how closely" two strings match?
>
>Ideally it would be "sort of" like a spelling checker, but extended to
>a string.  Simple transpositional errors (2 letters reversed), spelling,
>omitted substrings, etc., would be accounted for.
>
>[\] Jeff Kell, [log in to unmask]
 
We use the Arizona grep routines (agrep) on our 9000, but I've not tried
porting it to the 3000.  Specifically, it provides (amongst other things):
 
>1) the ability to search for approximate patterns;
>        for example, "agrep -2 homogenos foo" will find homogeneous as well
>        as any other word that can be obtained from homogenos with at most
>        2 substitutions, insertions, or deletions.
>        "agrep -B homogenos foo" will generate a message of the form
>        best match has 2 errors, there are 5 matches, output them? (y/n)
 
The algorithms used are all clearly described, so it might not be too much
effort to mangle to the 3000.
 
Unfortunately, I can't tell you how to find the source, other than at
Arizona University, Dept of Computer Science.  You are probably better tuned
into that than me anyway.
 
Lots of luck.
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