Fuzzy String Comparison

Question

What I am striving to complete is a program which reads in a file and will compare each sentence according to the original sentence. The sentence which is a perfect match to

Answer 1

There is a package called fuzzywuzzy. Install via pip:

pip install fuzzywuzzy

Simple usage:

>>> from fuzzywuzzy import fuzz
>>> fuzz.ratio("this is a test", "this is a test!")
    96

The package is built on top of difflib. Why not just use that, you ask? Apart from being a bit simpler, it has a number of different matching methods (like token order insensitivity, partial string matching) which make it more powerful in practice. The process.extract functions are especially useful: find the best matching strings and ratios from a set. From their readme:

Partial Ratio

>>> fuzz.partial_ratio("this is a test", "this is a test!")
    100

Token Sort Ratio

>>> fuzz.ratio("fuzzy wuzzy was a bear", "wuzzy fuzzy was a bear")
    90
>>> fuzz.token_sort_ratio("fuzzy wuzzy was a bear", "wuzzy fuzzy was a bear")
    100

Token Set Ratio

>>> fuzz.token_sort_ratio("fuzzy was a bear", "fuzzy fuzzy was a bear")
    84
>>> fuzz.token_set_ratio("fuzzy was a bear", "fuzzy fuzzy was a bear")
    100

Process

>>> choices = ["Atlanta Falcons", "New York Jets", "New York Giants", "Dallas Cowboys"]
>>> process.extract("new york jets", choices, limit=2)
    [('New York Jets', 100), ('New York Giants', 78)]
>>> process.extractOne("cowboys", choices)
    ("Dallas Cowboys", 90)