Compare 5000 strings with PHP Levenshtein

Question

I have 5000, sometimes more, street address strings in an array. I\'d like to compare them all with levenshtein to find similar matches. How can I do this without looping throug

Answer 1

If you want to find all similar values, you will have to compare all items to all others. But choosing the right array functions will speed things up significantly. Here is a quick example (the results array could have been better):

$results = array();
$count = count($entries);
while ($count != 0) {
    # The entry to process
    $entry = array_shift($entries);
    # Get levenshtein distances to all others
    $result = array_map(
        'levenshtein',
        # array_map() needs two arrays, this one is an array consisting of
        # multiple entries of the value that we are processing
        array_fill($entry, 0, $count),
        $toCompare
    );
    $results[] = array($entry => $result);
    $count--;
}