SYNOPSIS

use String::Similarity;
$similarity = similarity $string1, $string2;
$similarity = similarity $string1, $string2, $limit;

DESCRIPTION

$factor = similarity $string1, $string2, [$limit]

The "similarity"-function calculates the similarity index of its two arguments. A value of 0 means that the strings are entirely different. A value of 1 means that the strings are identical. Everything else lies between 0 and 1 and describes the amount of similarity between the strings.

It roughly works by looking at the smallest number of edits to change one string into the other.

You can add an optional argument $limit (default 0) that gives the minimum similarity the two strings must satisfy. "similarity" stops analyzing the string as soon as the result drops below the given limit, in which case the result will be invalid but lower than the given $limit. You can use this to speed up the common case of searching for the most similar string from a set by specifying the maximum similarity found so far.

AUTHOR

 Marc Lehmann <[email protected]>
 http://home.schmorp.de/
 (the underlying fstrcmp function was taken from gnu diffutils and
 modified by Peter Miller <[email protected]> and Marc Lehmann
 <[email protected]>).