Good Python modules for fuzzy string comparison?
fuzzy-comparison, python, string, string-comparison
Solution
Levenshtein Python extension and C library.
https://github.com/ztane/python-Levenshtein/
The Levenshtein Python C extension module contains functions for fast computation of - Levenshtein (edit) distance, and edit operations - string similarity - approximate median strings, and generally string averaging - string sequence and set similarity It supports both normal and Unicode strings.
$ pip install python-levenshtein
...
$ python
>>> import Levenshtein
>>> help(Levenshtein.ratio)
ratio(...)
Compute similarity of two strings.
ratio(string1, string2)
The similarity is a number between 0 and 1, it's usually equal or
somewhat higher than difflib.SequenceMatcher.ratio(), becuase it's
based on real minimal edit distance.
Examples:
>>> ratio('Hello world!', 'Holly grail!')
0.58333333333333337
>>> ratio('Brian', 'Jesus')
0.0
>>> help(Levenshtein.distance)
distance(...)
Compute absolute Levenshtein distance of two strings.
distance(string1, string2)
Examples (it's hard to spell Levenshtein correctly):
>>> distance('Levenshtein', 'Lenvinsten')
4
>>> distance('Levenshtein', 'Levensthein')
2
>>> distance('Levenshtein', 'Levenshten')
1
>>> distance('Levenshtein', 'Levenshtein')
0
Problem
I'm looking for a Python module that can do simple fuzzy string comparisons. Specifically, I'd like a percentage of how similar the strings are. I know this is potentially subjective so I was hoping to find a library that can do positional comparisons as well as longest similar string matches, among other things. Basically, I'm hoping to find something that is simple enough to yield a single percentage while still configurable enough that I can specify what type of comparison(s) to do.