String comparision

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:08:08 -0200, S.Selvam Siva <s.selvamsiva at gmail.com>  
escribió:

> I am developing spell checker for my local language(tamil) using python.
> I need to generate alternative word list for a miss-spelled word from the
> dictionary of words.The alternatives must be as much as closer to the
> miss-spelled word.As we know, ordinary string comparison wont work here .
> Any suggestion for this problem is welcome.

I think it would better to add Tamil support to some existing library like  
GNU aspell: http://aspell.net/
You are looking for "fuzzy matching":  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_string_searching
In particular, the Levenshtein distance is widely used; I think there is a  
Python extension providing those calculations.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina