similar_text

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7)

similar_text — Calcula la similitud entre dos strings

Descripción

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

Esta función calcula la similitud entre dos strings según se describe en Programming Classics: Implementing the World's Best Algorithms by Oliver (ISBN 0-131-00413-1). Nótese que esta implementación no utiliza una pila como en el pseudo código de Oliver, sino llamadas recursivas que pueden o no pueden acelerar todo el proceso. También tener en cuenta que la complejidad de este algoritmo es O(N**3) donde N es la longitud del string más largo.

Parámetros

first: El primer string.
second: El segundo string.
percent: Mediante el paso de una referencia como tercer argumento, similar_text() calculará la similitud en porcentaje.

Valores devueltos

Devuelve el número de caracteres coincidentes en ambos strings.

Ver también

levenshtein() - Cálculo de la distancia Levenshtein entre dos strings
soundex() - Calcula la clave soundex de un string

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User Contributed Notes 11 notes

down

SPAM HATER ¶

7 years ago


Hey there,



Be aware when using this function, that the order of passing the strings is very important if you want to calculate the percentage of similarity, in fact, altering the variables will give a very different result, example :



<?php

$var_1 = 'PHP IS GREAT';

$var_2 = 'WITH MYSQL';



similar_text($var_1, $var_2, $percent);



echo $percent;

// 27.272727272727



similar_text($var_2, $var_1, $percent);



echo $percent;

// 18.181818181818

?>

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daniel dot karbach at localhorst dot tv ¶

9 years ago


Please note that this function calculates a similarity of 0 (zero) for two empty strings.

<?php
similar_text("", "", $sim);
echo $sim; // "0"
?>

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vasyl at vasyltech dot com ¶

4 years ago


Recursive algorithm usually is very elegant one. I found a way to get better precision without the recursion. Imagine two different (or same) length ribbons with letters on each. You simply shifting one ribbon to left till it matches the letter the first.

<?php

function similarity($str1, $str2) {
    $len1 = strlen($str1);
    $len2 = strlen($str2);
    
    $max = max($len1, $len2);
    $similarity = $i = $j = 0;
    
    while (($i < $len1) && isset($str2[$j])) {
        if ($str1[$i] == $str2[$j]) {
            $similarity++;
            $i++;
            $j++;
        } elseif ($len1 < $len2) {
            $len1++;
            $j++;
        } elseif ($len1 > $len2) {
            $i++;
            $len1--;
        } else {
            $i++;
            $j++;
        }
    }

    return round($similarity / $max, 2);
}

$str1 = '12345678901234567890';
$str2 = '12345678991234567890';

echo 'Similarity: ' . (similarity($str1, $str2) * 100) . '%';
?>

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ryan at derokorian dot com ¶

5 years ago


Note that this function is case sensitive:

<?php

$var1 = 'Hello';
$var2 = 'Hello';
$var3 = 'hello';

echo similar_text($var1, $var2);  // 5
echo similar_text($var1, $var3);  // 4

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I_HATE_SPAMMER- PAZ! ¶

5 years ago


Actually similar_text() is not bad...
it works good. But before processing i think is a good way to make a little mod like this

$var_1 = strtoupper("doggy");
$var_2 = strtoupper("Dog");

similar_text($var_1, $var_2, $percent); 

echo $percent; // output is 75 but without strtoupper output is 50

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Paul ¶

13 years ago


The speed issues for similar_text seem to be only an issue for long sections of text (>20000 chars).

I found a huge performance improvement in my application by just testing if the string to be tested was less than 20000 chars before calling similar_text.

20000+ took 3-5 secs to process, anything else (10000 and below) took a fraction of a second.
Fortunately for me, there was only a handful of instances with >20000 chars which I couldn't get a comparison % for.

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daniel at reflexionsdesign dot com ¶

18 years ago


If performance is an issue, you may wish to use the levenshtein() function instead, which has a considerably better complexity of O(str1 * str2).

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julius at infoguiden dot no ¶

17 years ago


If you have reserved names in a database that you don't want others to use, i find this to work pretty good. 

I added strtoupper to the variables to validate typing only. Taking case into consideration will decrease similarity. 



<?php

$query = mysql_query("select * from $table") or die("Query failed");



while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {

      similar_text(strtoupper($_POST['name']), strtoupper($row['reserved']), $similarity_pst);

      if (number_format($similarity_pst, 0) > 90){

        $too_similar = $row['reserved'];

        print "The name you entered is too similar the reserved name &quot;".$row['reserved']."&quot;";

        break;

       }

    }

?>

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georgesk at hotmail dot com ¶

17 years ago


Well, as mentioned above the speed is O(N^3), i've done a longest common subsequence way that is O(m.n) where m and n are the length of str1 and str2, the result is a percentage and it seems to be exactly the same as similar_text percentage but with better performance... here's the 3 functions i'm using..



<?php

function LCS_Length($s1, $s2)

{

  $m = strlen($s1);

  $n = strlen($s2);



  //this table will be used to compute the LCS-Length, only 128 chars per string are considered

  $LCS_Length_Table = array(array(128),array(128)); 

  

  

  //reset the 2 cols in the table

  for($i=1; $i < $m; $i++) $LCS_Length_Table[$i][0]=0;

  for($j=0; $j < $n; $j++) $LCS_Length_Table[0][$j]=0;



  for ($i=1; $i <= $m; $i++) {

    for ($j=1; $j <= $n; $j++) {

      if ($s1[$i-1]==$s2[$j-1])

        $LCS_Length_Table[$i][$j] = $LCS_Length_Table[$i-1][$j-1] + 1;

      else if ($LCS_Length_Table[$i-1][$j] >= $LCS_Length_Table[$i][$j-1])

        $LCS_Length_Table[$i][$j] = $LCS_Length_Table[$i-1][$j];

      else

        $LCS_Length_Table[$i][$j] = $LCS_Length_Table[$i][$j-1];

    }

  }

  return $LCS_Length_Table[$m][$n];

}



function str_lcsfix($s)

{

  $s = str_replace(" ","",$s);

  $s = ereg_replace("[��������]","e", $s);

  $s = ereg_replace("[������������]","a", $s);

  $s = ereg_replace("[��������]","i", $s);

  $s = ereg_replace("[���������]","o", $s);

  $s = ereg_replace("[��������]","u", $s);

  $s = ereg_replace("[�]","c", $s);

  return $s;

}

  

function get_lcs($s1, $s2)

{

  //ok, now replace all spaces with nothing

  $s1 = strtolower(str_lcsfix($s1));

  $s2 = strtolower(str_lcsfix($s2));

  

  $lcs = LCS_Length($s1,$s2); //longest common sub sequence



  $ms = (strlen($s1) + strlen($s2)) / 2;



  return (($lcs*100)/$ms);

}

?>



you can skip calling str_lcsfix if you don't worry about accentuated characters and things like that or you can add up to it or modify it for faster performance, i think ereg is not the fastest way?

hope this helps.

Georges

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-2

romain dot boyer at gmail dot com ¶

12 years ago


Like levenchtein(), You can do :

(strlen($string2) - similar_text($string,$string2))

to see how much characters have been changed.

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-31

donotspamme at mailinator dot com ¶

4 years ago


@I_HATE_SPAMMER- PAZ! (http://php.net/similar_text#115994)
Not only will your code fail the "turkey test" (google it), and for a matter most comments here that use strtoupper()/strtolower(), it also depends very much on the use-case; maybe I wanted the 75% ? I don't see the value of such comments; this is something everybody could've come op with. It's basic programming and turning requirements into algorithms.

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