About

Fuzzycomp is a package purely implemented in Python for comparing sequences or strings. Some algorithms work equally well on strings as on any iterable and some algorithms are only for string comparison.

Platforms

Fuzzycomp has been tested to work with the following versions of python.

• Python 2.4
• Python 2.5
• Python 2.6
• Python 2.7

Algorithms

Fuzzycomp implements the following algorithms.

Comparison

• Levenshtein Distance
• JaccardDistance
• Hamming Distance
• Jaro Distance
• Jaro Winkler Distance
• Dice Coefficient
• Longest common subsequence

Phonetic

• American Soundex
• New York State Identification and Intelligence System ( NYSIIS )
• Metaphone
• Cologne Phonetic (Kölner Phonetik)

Background

There several major reasons for developing and publishing fuzzycomp although there are other packages available, implementing most of the algorithms present in fuzzycomp.

1. There are an astonishing amount of different ways available for classifying how similar two strings are, once you leave the domain of perfect matching. It started with me, needing a way to tell how well a search phrase was matching the results provided by an external API. Once I started searching, I was really amazed by the subject and by the many alternatives there were so I wanted to learn more by developing the algorithms in Python.
2. This is my first Python packages developed with the intent to be distributed and used by others. I wanted to learn how to structure and develop a Python package that could be released to the public and that could be useful in some way.
3. The last couple of years I have read more and more about unit-testing and test driven development (TDD), almost always positive things. I have not had the opportunity to use unit-tests in any previous projects, so this is my learning ground for TDD and writing unit-tests.

Install

The package is not yet represented on PyPI so the best ways to install fuzzycomp at the moment are:

Using pip replacing X Y Z for the version number that you want to install:

pip install https://github.com/fuzzycode/fuzzycomp/downloads/fuzzycomp-X.Y.Z.tar.gz

Or by downloading and unpacking the desired version and from the console executing:

python setup.py install

Usage

Some example usage of fuzzycomp:

>>> from fuzzycomp import fuzzycomp
>>> fuzzycomp.levenshtein_distance( "Hello", "world" )
3

>>> fuzzycomp.soundex("Alfred")
'A416'

Alternatives

If speed is of utmost importance to you or you find yourself comparing very long sequences, you should probably consider some of the available alternatives out there. They implement most of the algorithms in C so should be considerably faster.

Some, but by no means all, alternatives are:

• python-Levenshtein
• Fuzzy
• jellyfish

Contact

For bugs or feature requests, please use the issue tracker on the project page.

To get in contact with me regarding the project, please email fuzzycomp@googlegroups.com or follow me on twitter @fuzzycode.