Potential Duplicates Detection, with 3 Severity Level

Question

I wanna make a program that detect a potential duplicates with 3 severity level. let consider my data is only in two column, but with thousands row. data in second column d

Answer 1

Really, it depends how you want to define "severity level". Here's one way to do it, not necessarily the best: Use the Levensthein distance.

Represent each of your items by a one-character attribute symbol, e.g.

H    helmet
K    knight
I    iron
$    Leather
^    Valros
╔    Plain
¢    Whatever
etc.

Then convert your Material lists into a string containing sequence of characters representing these attributes:

HIK = helmet,iron,knight
¢H  = plain,helmet

Then compute the Levenshtein distance between those two strings. That will be your "severity level".

Debug.Print LevenshteinDistance("HIK","¢H")
'returns 3

Two implementations of the Levenshtein distance are shown in Wikipedia. And indeed you are in luck: someone on StackOverflow ported this to VBA.

In the comments section below, you say you don't like having to represent each of your possible attributes by one-character symbols. Fair enough; I agree this is a bit silly. Workaround: It is, in fact, possible to adapt the Levenshtein Distance algorithm to look not at each character in a string, but at each element of an array instead, and do comparisons based on that. I show how to make this change in my answer to your follow-up question.