PUBLIC MARKS from parmentierf with tags "string matching" & search

Last month, I needed to use the metaphone and edit (Levenshtein) distance algorithms for a fuzzy search of a MySQL table. Of course, neither is available as a built-in MySQL function. So, I had to install them as UDFs. The MySQL source distribution includes a metaphone UDF function in udf_example.cc. However, I couldn't find a Levenshtein UDF anywhere, so I wrote one, by converting a C implementation by Lorenzo Seidenari. I suspect that other people could benefit from this code, and you can download it from joshdrew.com. I compared the function's output to that of the PHP levensthein() function for a couple million word pairs; the results agreed completely - that's good enough for me. (this code comes with no warranty whatsoever, but I really hope you find it useful)