Best way to identify similar text inside strings? - string

Question

I've a list of phrases, actually it's an Excel file, but I can extract each single line if needed.
I need to find the line that is quite similar, for example one line can be:
ANTIBRATING SSPIRING JOINT (type 2) mod. GA160 (temp.max60°)
and some line after I can have the same line or this one:
ANTIBRATING SSPIRING JOINT (type 2) mod. GA200 (temp.max60°)
Like you can see these two lines are pretty the same, not equal in this case but at 98%
The main problem is that I've to process about 45k lines, for this reason I'm searching a way to do that in a quick and maybe visual way.
The first thing that came in my mind was to compare the very 1st line to the 2nd then the 3rd till the end, and so on with the 2nd one and the 3rd one till latest-1 and make a kind of score, for example the 1st line is 100% with line 42, 99% with line 522 ... 21% with line 22142 etc etc...
But is only one idea, maybe not the best.
Maybe out there's already a good program/script/online services/program, I searched but I can't find it, so at the end I asked here.
Anyone knows a good way (if this is possible) or script or one online services to achieve this?

Answer 1

One thing you can do is write a script, which does as follows:
Extract data from csv file
Define a regex which can conclude a similarity, a python example can be:
[\w\s]+\([\w]+\)[\w\s]+\([\w°]+\)
Or such, refer the documentation.

Answer 2

The problem you have is that you are not looking for an exact match, but a like.
This is a problem even databases have never solved and results in a full table scan.
So we're unlikely to solve it.
However, I'd like to propose that you consider alternatives:
You could decide to limit the differences to specific character sets.
In the above example, you were ignoring numbers, but respected letters.
If we can assume that this rule will always hold true, then we can perform a text replace on the string.
ANTIBRATING SSPIRING JOINT (type 2) mod. GA160 (temp.max60°) ==> ANTIBRATING SSPIRING JOINT (type _) mod. GA_ (temp.max_°)
Now, we can deal with this problem by performing an exact string comparison. This can be done by hashing. The easiest way is to feed a hashmap/hashset or a database with a hash index on the column where you will store this adjusted text.
You could decide to trade time for space.
For example, you can feed the strings to a service which will build lots of different variations of indexes on your string. For example, feed elasticsearch with your data, and then perform analytic queries on it.

Answer 3

Fuzzy searches is the key.
I found several projects and ideas, but the one I used is tree-agrep, I know that is quite old but in this case works for me, I created this little script to help me to create a list of differences, so I can manually check it with my file
#!/bin/bash
########## CONFIGURATIONS ##########
original_file=/path/jjj.txt
t_agrep_bin="$(command -v tre-agrep)"
destination_file=/path/destination_file.txt
distance=1
########## CONFIGURATIONS ##########
lines=$(grep "" -c "$original_file")
if [[ -s "$destination_file" ]]; then
rm -rf "$destination_file"
fi
start=1
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "Checking line $start/$lines"
lista=$($t_agrep_bin -$distance -B --colour -s -n -i "$line" $original_file)
echo "$lista" | awk -F ':' '{print $1}' ORS=' ' >> "$destination_file"
echo >> "$destination_file"
start=$((start+1))
done < "$original_file"