Re: Using special characters in left part of a regex match?

[Kenosis]

in reply to Using special characters in left part of a regex match?

Would something like the Levenshtein edit distance assist you (the greater the value, the greater the two strings' distance)?

use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::LevenshteinXS qw(distance);

my @var;
$var[0]  = "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres";
$var[1]  = "Gallia est omnis divisa in ...";
$var[2]  = "Gallia est omnis ...";
$var[3]  = "Gallia";
$var[4]  = "... omnis divisa in ...";
$var[5]  = "Gallia est ... tres";
$var[6]  = "Gallia ... partes tres";
$var[7]  = "Gallia est ... partes tres";
$var[8]  = "Gallia ... divisa ... tres";
$var[9]  = "... tres";
$var[10] = "quattuor";

print qq{Each string's 'distance' from "$var[0]":\n\n};

for ( 0 .. $#var ) {
    print distance( $var[0], $var[$_] ) . " - $var[$_]\n";
}

Output:

Each string's 'distance' from "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres"
+:

0 - Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres
11 - Gallia est omnis divisa in ...
21 - Gallia est omnis ...
32 - Gallia
21 - ... omnis divisa in ...
22 - Gallia est ... tres
19 - Gallia ... partes tres
15 - Gallia est ... partes tres
18 - Gallia ... divisa ... tres
33 - ... tres
34 - quattuor

[soonix]

Is there a Levenshtein implementation that uses words instead of letters? That probably would be suitable to the problem at hand, although not exactly what the OP wanted.

[shamat]

Thank you Kenosis, I was not aware of that, it may be a useful tool for further researches.