how to 'fuzzy' match strings when merge two dataframe in pandas

Question

I have two dataframe df1 and df2.

df1 = pd.DataFrame ({\'Name\': [\'Adam Smith\', \'Anne Kim\', \'John Weber\', \'Ian Ford\'],
             


        

Answer 1

I am using fuzzywuzzy here

from fuzzywuzzy import fuzz
from fuzzywuzzy import process



df2['key']=df2.Name.apply(lambda x : [process.extract(x, df1.Name, limit=1)][0][0][0])

df2.merge(df1,left_on='key',right_on='Name')
Out[1238]: 
        Name_x gender         key  Age      Name_y
0   adam Smith      M  Adam Smith   43  Adam Smith
1    Annie Kim      F    Anne Kim   21    Anne Kim
2  John  Weber      M  John Weber   55  John Weber
3     Ian Ford      M    Ian Ford   24    Ian Ford

Answer 2

Not sure if fuzzy match is what you are looking for. Maybe make every name a proper name?

df1.Name = df1.Name.apply(lambda x: x.title())
df2.Name = df2.Name.apply(lambda x: x.title())

pd.merge(df1, df2, how='inner', on='Name')