Comparing two strings

[Pierre Azoulay]

Hello Stata listers,

I am matching last names across two datasets. I know lots of packages have been developed for this, but I rather do my own thing. Is there an easy way to easily compare two strings that goes beyond soundex. Maybe ignoring character order, returning the "difference" between the character in the strings?

Pierre

[Daniel Schaefer]

It kinda depends on what you're doing, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

Edit: Reading the wikipedia article, I didn't realize this is a dynamic programming problem! Pretty cool!