I'm looking for a module to do fuzzy comparison of strings. I have 2 item master files which are supposed to be identical, but they have thousands of records where the item numbers don't match in various ways. One might include a '-' or have leading zeros, or have a single character missing, or a zero that is typed as a letter 'O'. That kind of thing. These tables currently reside in a mysql database. I was wondering if there is a good package to let me compare strings and return a value that is a measure of their similarity. Kind of like soundex but for strings that aren't words.
Thanks, Steve Bergman -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
