similar_text()

similar_text - Calculate the similarity between two strings

Syntax

int similar_text (string $first, string $second, float &$percent)

Arguments

• first - The first string.
• second - The second string.
• percent - By passing a reference as third argument, similar_text() will calculate the similarity in percent for you.

Description

This calculates the similarity between two strings as described in Oliver [1993]. Note that this implementation does not use a stack as in Oliver's pseudo code, but recursive calls which may or may not speed up the whole process. Note also that the complexity of this algorithm is O(N**3) where N is the length of the longest string.

Version

PHP 4, 5

Return value

Returns the number of matching chars in both strings.