Find matching strings

[Philipp Reinhold]

Hey guys,
I'm totally new to Stata and found this Forum. Hi to everyone!

Currently I'm trying to find matching strings. The situation is as follows.

I got a big database with company investments. Now I have to find these companies in Thomson Reuters, unfortunately I don't have any ticker or similar, just the company names.
The plan is to download long lists of names from TR and try to match the TR-Names with the names in my database in order to find the respective tickers.
And thanks to the messie database these names will defenetly not be exactly the same.

Is there an effective way to match these lists of names without searching for the (severel thousand) names one by one? In the best case including a measure how accurate the match is (maybe in percent)?

Any help is highly appreciated!
Thank you
Philipp

[Dave Airey]

Stata has grep and soundex functions built in. See help string functions. Otherwise search the SSC using keywords from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approx...tring_matching, perhaps, which gives for example, strdist.

[William Lisowski]

Others here have had success with the user-written matchit command from Julio Raffo, as discussed in the following two threads.

http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...s-observations

http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...-e-fuzzy-match

[Philipp Reinhold]

I will try my luck wuth your suggestions. Thanks for the fast reply.