RE: Fuzzy search??

Not in the standard Java API, no. There are probably products out there to do 
what you want, which is actually more complicated than what you say because you 
could have "E" or "E." instead of "East" for example.

If the addresses in your file aren't standardized then I think you're 
addressing the problem at the wrong end. You need to standardize them. This is 
called "data cleansing" by businesses who have to have correct addresses. Used 
to be that you'd have to pay a lot of money to the Post Office to get their 
address data, but now there are free web services like http://geocoder.ca that 
can (among other things) standardize your address information.

On the other hand if your addresses are in good shape and you're trying to 
build an inquiry given partial information, then just pick one of the words 
(e.g. "Battery" and not e.g. "East") and do an SQL query with the keyword 
"CONTAINS" or "LIKE". This is going to be human-driven anyway, so then let the 
user pick which of the names containing "Battery" they really wanted.

Regards
PC2 

-----Original Message-----
From: java400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:java400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of RPower@xxxxxxxxxx
Sent: May 31, 2006 09:44
To: Java Programming on and around the iSeries / AS400
Subject: Fuzzy search??

Wondering if anyone out there has something I need.  Basically, if I have a 
street name "Middle East Battery Rd" and I want to find it in a file, but in 
the file it could be "East Middle Battery Rd" or "Battery Rd, Middle East" etc. 
is there a function that will match all the words from one phrase to the words 
of another?

Ron Power
Programmer
Information Services
City Of St. John's, NL
P.O. Box 908
St. John's, NL
A1C 5M2
709-576-8132
rpower@xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.stjohns.ca/
___________________________________________________________________________
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