perl-String-Approx

String::Approx lets you match and substitute strings approximately. With
this you can emulate errors: typing errorrs, speling errors, closely
related vocabularies (colour color), genetic mutations (GAG ACT),
abbreviations (McScot, MacScot).
NOTE: String::Approx suits the task of string matching, not string
comparison, and it works for strings, not for text.
If you want to compare strings for similarity, you probably just want the
Levenshtein edit distance (explained below), the Text::Levenshtein and
Text::LevenshteinXS modules in CPAN. See also Text::WagnerFischer and
Text::PhraseDistance. (There are functions for this in String::Approx, e.g.
adist(), but their results sometimes differ from the bare Levenshtein et
al.)
If you want to compare things like text or source code, consisting of
words or tokens and phrases and sentences, or expressions and
statements, you should probably use some other tool than String::Approx,
like for example the standard UNIX diff(1) tool, or the Algorithm::Diff
module from CPAN.
The measure of approximateness is the Levenshtein edit distance. It is
the total number of "edits": insertions,
word world


deletions,
monkey money


and substitutions
sun fun


required to transform a string to another string. For example, to transform
"lead" into "gold", you need three edits:
lead gead goad gold


The edit distance of "lead" and "gold" is therefore three, or 75%.
String::Approx uses the Levenshtein edit distance as its measure, but
String::Approx is not well-suited for comparing strings of different
length, in other words, if you want a "fuzzy eq", see above. String::Approx
is more like regular expressions or index(), it finds substrings that are
close matches.>

          

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License: LGPL-2.0 OR Artistic-2.0
URL: http://search.cpan.org/dist/String-Approx/