I would see if you if you can download a dedupe tool or this purpose no point in letting ColdFusion do it when others have done the hard work :-)
"This e-mail is from Reed Exhibitions (Gateway House, 28 The Quadrant, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 1DN, United Kingdom), a division of Reed Business, Registered in England, Number 678540. It contains information which is confidential and may also be privileged. It is for the exclusive use of the intended recipient(s). If you are not the intended recipient(s) please note that any form of distribution, copying or use of this communication or the information in it is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error please return it to the sender or call our switchboard on +44 (0) 20 89107910. The opinions expressed within this communication are not necessarily those expressed by Reed Exhibitions." Visit our website at http://www.reedexpo.com -----Original Message----- From: Matthew Reinbold To: CF-Talk Sent: Sun Jan 14 16:28:16 2007 Subject: Detecting (Almost) Matches for DeDuping? I have a dataset that I've put together from a number of client files. To this point I've been able to easily build a set of ColdFusion tools for using the data but there is a de-duping process that I need to do that I just don't now how to approach. The data has a series of first and last names. While most of the time I'm able to detect last name, first name, and date of birth and create a unique entry in the unified person table. The problem comes when the names are slightly mis-spelled. For example I may have: RIVERA and RIVEERA -or- MARTINEZ and MARTINE and because I'm doing exact matching these are appearing as two seperate entries. I really don't want to eyeball the entire table (thousands of lines) and manually pick out problem rows. And I don't think I can completely automate the detection AND correction of dupes. At this point I just want to run ColdFusion code, have it detect potential dupes, and then let me take action. How would I do this? Is a regular expression possible that can detect if two strings are ALMOST matches? Any help or suggestions would be most appreciated. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Create robust enterprise, web RIAs. Upgrade & integrate Adobe Coldfusion MX7 with Flex 2 http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;56760587;14748456;a?http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/flex2/?sdid=LVNU Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:266549 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
