[issue21344] save scores or ratios in difflib get_close_matches

[Russell Ballestrini]

Russell Ballestrini added the comment:

Tim,

You bring up some great points and insight I was missing.

"To me the scores just aren't interesting beyond which words' scores exceed a cutoff, and the ordering of words based on their similarity scores - but `get_close_matches()` already captures those uses."

For a *word*, and a corpus of *possibilities*, how does one choose a satisfactory *cutoff* without inspecting the output of the scoring algorithm?

Personally, I don't want to inpect scores for inspection sake, I want to inspect scores so I can make an informed decision for the *n* and *cutoff* input arguments.

Its true that after reading and digesting the source code for `get_close_matches()` I could (and did) implement a version that returns scores.  My goal was to share this code and what better way then to "fix" the problem upstream.

I understand the desire to keep the standard library lean and useful to reduce the amount of burden the code is to maintain.  I will understand if we decide not to include these patches, I can always maintain a fork and share on pypi.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue21344>
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