Help needed comparing address

[jcarneir]

Hi

I wonder if there are some sort of algorithm to compare texts. I receive addresses (street xxx, buildind yyy, city zzz, ...) and I want compare the new addresses with the old ones in order to know if they may exists in the database and launch a warning.

I need to catch new entries that have a high likelyhood of match with old entries in order to launch the warning and the user check both addresses and decide if they are equals or not.

Sorry my English

 

[TonyJollans]

Hi jcarneir,

There's no easy way to do this I'm afraid. Address validation and comparison generally requires specialist, often expensive, software and/or databases (e.g the Post Office Address File (PAF) in the UK). It does depend on the country to some extent - English and French addresses are more variable than, say, German or Swiss ones.

If you just receive addresses as unformatted text it may be very difficult but as say you have a user you are, presumably, getting some sort of structured input. Can you not design your input form to have comparison data (postcode, house number, etc.) in separate fields?

Enjoy,
Tony

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[PHV]

You may consider SOUNDEX.

Hope This Helps, PH.
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[jcarneir]

I finding something like this:

"Length of LCS (Longest Common Subsequence) is a good measure of the similarity of two strings"

I got this link: "

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cach..."comparing+texts"+algorithm+plagiarism&hl=es"

but I want to get more algorithms for testing pourpouses (I want test both quality and velocity)