What is a simple fuzzy string matching algorithm in Python?

Question

I\'m trying to find some sort of a good, fuzzy string matching algorithm. Direct matching doesn\'t work for me — this isn\'t too good because unless my strings are a 100% si

Answer 1

I like Drew's answer.

You can use difflib to find the longest match:

>>> a = 'The quick brown fox.'
>>> b = 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.'
>>> import difflib
>>> s = difflib.SequenceMatcher(None, a, b)
>>> s.find_longest_match(0,len(a),0,len(b))
Match(a=0, b=0, size=19) # returns NamedTuple (new in v2.6)

Or pick some minimum matching threshold. Example:

>>> difflib.SequenceMatcher(None, a, b).ratio()
0.61538461538461542