In response to Peter Geoghegan <peter.geoghegan86@xxxxxxxxx>: > > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/fuzzystrmatch.html > > > > -- > > Bill Moran > > http://www.potentialtech.com > > http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/ > > Fuzzystrmatch is generally used to compare two single words for how > similar they sound. How can that actually be applied to get the > functionality that I've described? Well, it really depends on your particular situation and what you want to support. You could break the name down into individual words and generate metaphones, then use like to match on metaphone: 'The Candlestick Corporation, Limited' -> 'TE CDSK CPRN LMTD' Searching for "candlestick" -> WHERE metaphone column like '%CDSK%' Or you could create an array column that has all the metaphones in it and use an ANY() or ALL() match to find ones that apply. Exactly how you implement depends on how far you want to go. Do you want to support OR matches, AND matches, or both? Can the words be out of order? You could also use Levenshtein as a percentage function to find matches, even on long strings with multiple words. Since Levenshtein gives you the number of alterations between two strings, using that as a percentage of the total string length gives you a pretty good gauge of how close they are overall, and would allow you to set a threshold, or possibly even list results by relevance. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/ -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
