Percentage matching of text

[Tim Churches]

On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 23:52, Bruce Eckel wrote:
> What I'd like to do is find an algorithm that produces the results of
> a text comparison as a percentage-match. Thus I would be able to
> assert that my test samples must match the control sample by at least
> (for example) 83% for the test to pass. Clearly, this wouldn't be a
> perfect test but it would help flag problems, which is primarily what
> I need.
> 
> Does anyone know of an algorithm or library that would do this? Thanks
> in advance.

Python implementations of a range of such algorithms can be found in
Febrl - see section 9.2 of the manual:
http://datamining.anu.edu.au/projects/linkage.html#prototype_software

I suspect that a simple bigram comparison would meet your needs best. Or
just use the Python difflib module in the standard Python library which
implements the Ratcliff-Obershelp comparator.
-- 

Tim C

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