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

http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/dev/merging.html does not have a hook function to do this on the fly. Would be nice though...

I would just do a separate step and use difflib getclosest_matches to create a new column in one of the 2 dataframes and the merge/join on the fuzzy matched column