Hi all.
I’m trying to devise a way to implement a “near text search” when querying a
mySQL database. My problem is, I get spreadsheet forms filled out by hand from
our dispatcher, and he sometimes makes typos, just small ones, and I need to
ensure there are no virtual duplicate customer records in my application. So I
need to query the database in sic a way that I come up with the nearest
neighbor. I could do this easily in Foxpro, because they provide an argument
for it, but I’ve searched around and no one seems to be able to produce a
nearest neighbor search for text! You can do it for numbers, just not text.
So now I’m trying to devise a way to convert a string to a number in such a way
that the likelihood there could be a match would be extremely unlikely. So far
I’ve come up with this:
function textToNum theString
put lower(theString)
put 1 into theSeed
repeat for each char theAscii in theString
put charToNum(theAscii) into theAsciiCode
add (theAsciiCode*theSeed) to theNum
add 1 to theSeed
end repeat
return theNum
end textToNum
The idea is that each character position would be multiplied by a seed value
representing it’s position in the string. However I can foresee that it would
be statistically possible to get pretty close and even get a match for two
completely different strings. I *could* use a seed value equal to the number of
lower case printable characters in the lower ascii table, but that could
produce HUGE numbers and I am afraid of overflows.
Any thoughts?
Bob
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