Matching incorrectly spelt words with correct ones in python

Question

I\'m building an app that gets incoming SMSs, then based on a keyword, it looks to see if that keyword is associated with any campaigns that it is running. The way I\'m doin

Answer 1

I use levenshtein distance to solve similar problem see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

def distance(u1, u2):
    try:
        s1 = unicode(u1)    
        s2 = unicode(u2)
    except:
        s1 = u1
        s2 = u2        
    if len(s1) < len(s2):
        return distance(u2, u1)
    if not s1:
        return len(s2)

    previous_row = xrange(len(s2) + 1)
    for i, c1 in enumerate(s1):
        current_row = [i + 1]
        for j, c2 in enumerate(s2):
            insertions = previous_row[j + 1] + 1 # j+1 instead of j since previous_row and current_row are one character longer
            deletions = current_row[j] + 1       # than s2
            substitutions = previous_row[j] + (c1 != c2)
            current_row.append(min(insertions, deletions, substitutions))
        previous_row = current_row

    return previous_row[-1]


distance("hamstir", "hamster") < 3
True
distance("god", "hamster") < 3
False