String similarity

I know I have heard of a couple functions/algorithms before that test two strings to see if they are similar (but not necessarily equal or equivalent). Does anybody know anything about this? I can't remember the name of the function/algorithm...and I was wanting to learn more about it.

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Originally Posted by DavidP

I know I have heard of a couple functions/algorithms before that test two strings to see if they are similar (but not necessarily equal or equivalent). Does anybody know anything about this? I can't remember the name of the function/algorithm...and I was wanting to learn more about it.

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Levenshtein distance?

Regex?

How do you define how similar the strings need to be for them to be considered similar?

no not regular expressions.

It's Levenshtein distance. Thanks!

There's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex