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Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem

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On 06/11/2014 10:35 AM, Michael Torrie wrote:
> On 06/11/2014 06:23 AM, BrJohan wrote:
>> For some genealogical purposes I consider using Python's re module.
>>
>> Rather many names can be spelled in a number of similar ways, and in 
>> order to match names even if they are spelled differently, I will build 
>> regular expressions, each of which is supposed to match  a number of 
>> similar names.
> You might want to search for fuzzy matching algorithms. Years ago, there
> was an algorithm called soundex that would generate fuzzy fingerprints
> for words that would hide differences in spelling, etc.  Unfortunately
> such an algorithm would be language dependent.  The problem you are
> trying to solve is one of those very hard problems in computers and math.
>

Soundex is actually not horrible, but it is definitely only for English
names. Newer variants of Metaphone
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone) are significantly better, and
support quite a few other languages.  Either one would most likely be
better than the regex approach.

Side note: if your data happens to be in MySQL then it has a builtin
"sounds_like()" function that compares strings using soundex.

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Python's re module and genealogy problem BrJohan <brjohan@gmail.com> - 2014-06-11 14:23 +0200
  Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> - 2014-06-11 14:26 +0100
    Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem Mark H Harris <harrismh777@gmail.com> - 2014-06-11 09:08 -0500
  Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem Thomas Rachel <nutznetz-0c1b6768-bfa9-48d5-a470-7603bd3aa915@spamschutz.glglgl.de> - 2014-06-11 15:55 +0200
  Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem Michael Torrie <torriem@gmail.com> - 2014-06-11 09:34 -0600
  Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem Nick Cash <nick.cash@npcinternational.com> - 2014-06-11 16:21 +0000
  Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem Simon Ward <simon@bleah.co.uk> - 2014-06-11 18:21 +0100
  Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem Vlastimil Brom <vlastimil.brom@gmail.com> - 2014-06-11 20:09 +0200
  Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem BrJohan <brjohan@gmail.com> - 2014-06-13 17:17 +0200
    Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem Peter Otten <__peter__@web.de> - 2014-06-13 18:26 +0200
    Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem Dan Sommers <dan@tombstonezero.net> - 2014-06-14 05:14 +0000
  Re: Python's re module and genealogy problem Tony the Tiger <tony@tiger.invalid> - 2014-06-14 08:35 +0000

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