is it possible to do fuzzy match merge with python pandas?

Question

I have two DataFrames which I want to merge based on a column. However, due to alternate spellings, different number of spaces, absence/presence of diacritical marks, I woul

Answer 1

I would use Jaro-Winkler, because it is one of the most performant and accurate approximate string matching algorithms currently available [Cohen, et al.], [Winkler].

This is how I would do it with Jaro-Winkler from the jellyfish package:

def get_closest_match(x, list_strings):

  best_match = None
  highest_jw = 0

  for current_string in list_strings:
    current_score = jellyfish.jaro_winkler(x, current_string)

    if(current_score > highest_jw):
      highest_jw = current_score
      best_match = current_string

  return best_match

df1 = pandas.DataFrame([[1],[2],[3],[4],[5]], index=['one','two','three','four','five'], columns=['number'])
df2 = pandas.DataFrame([['a'],['b'],['c'],['d'],['e']], index=['one','too','three','fours','five'], columns=['letter'])

df2.index = df2.index.map(lambda x: get_closest_match(x, df1.index))

df1.join(df2)

Output:

    number  letter
one     1   a
two     2   b
three   3   c
four    4   d
five    5   e