ALGORITHM - String similarity score/hash

Question

Is there a method to calculate something like general \"similarity score\" of a string? In a way that I am not comparing two strings together but rather I get some number/scores

Answer 1

You can always use Levenshtein distance, also, there is a written implementation for that: http://code.google.com/p/pylevenshtein/

But, for simplicity, you can use builtin difflib module:

>>> import difflib
>>> l
{'Hello Earth', 'Hello World!', 'Foo Bar!', 'Foo world!', 'Foo bar', 'Hello World', 'FooBarbar'}
>>> difflib.get_close_matches("Foo World", l)
['Foo world!', 'Hello World', 'Hello World!']

http://docs.python.org/library/difflib.html#difflib.get_close_matches