php : word proximity script?

Question

Okay - so, I\'ve spent ages searching in Google, and even went through a few specific searches at hotscripts etc., several php forums and this place ... nothing (not of use anyw

Answer 1

your example searched Word1 ... Word2, should Word2 ... Word1 also be matched? A simple solution is to use RegEx:

i.e.:

1. use regex: \bWord1\b(.*)\bWord2\b
2. in the first match group, use space (or whatever boundary) to split it into an array, and count

this is the most straight forward method, but definitely not the best (i.e. performance wise) method. I think you need to clarify your needs if you want a more specific answer.

Update:

After the 2 questions are merged, I see other answers mentioning soundex, levinstein and hamming distance etc. I would suggest theclueless1 to CLARIFY the requirements so that people can give useful help. If this is an application related to searching or document clustering, I also suggest you to take a look at mature full text indexing/searching solutions such as sphinx or lucene. I think any of them can be used with PHP.