Re: Determining the similarity between a user supplied short piece of text (between 5 and 15 characters) and a list of similar length text items.

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 11:54, Richard Quadling <rquadling@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm looking for is a way to compare what they've entered against a > known list and to provide my 10 best guesses. Look into the following functions and families: levenshtein() similar_text() You wouldn't want to use metaphone() or soundex(), because you're working with alphanumeric combinations, but if you want to be a glutton for punishment, it could be fun. Something along the lines of using levenshtein() to get the best matches, then similar_text() to score each of the matches would probably be a viable solution for you. The last time I incorporated something like that was for my own use to track down a record in a MySQL database for which I could remember just a small blip of text. It looked through about 23 million records in under two minutes and I found exactly what it was for which I was searching --- even though I was off by one word. Would've taken me forever to find it using alternative methods. -- </Daniel P. Brown> UNADVERTISED DEDICATED SERVER SPECIALS SAME-DAY SETUP Just ask me what we're offering today! daniel.brown@parasane.net || danbrown@php.net http://www.parasane.net/ || http://www.pilotpig.net/