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# similar_text

(PHP 3 >= 3.0.7, PHP 4, PHP 5)

similar_text -- Calculate the similarity between two strings

## Description

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

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.

By passing a reference as third argument, similar_text() will calculate the similarity in percent for you. It returns the number of matching chars in both strings.

See also levenshtein(), and soundex().

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