Mysql compare Strings

Question

Hi,

from a resultset of about 5 different strings, I would like to select the result of which the string resembles my given string the most. Is there any possibility to do this in mysql?

Answer 1

You might be able to achieve this using SOUNDEX

Answer 2

This sounds like the perfect application of the Levenshtein distance metric.

It appears that there is at least one UDF implementation of this metric, which may have fallen off the web, and another SQL implementation.