Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How to do it...

Perform the following steps for this recipe:

1. Given a string, we want to compare:

>>> s = 'Today the weather is nice'

2. Furthermore, we want to compare a set of strings to the first string:

>>> s2 = 'Today the weater is nice'
>>> s3 = 'Yesterday the weather was nice'
>>> s4 = 'Today my dog ate steak'

3. We can use difflib.SequenceMatcher to compute the similitude (from 0 to 1) between the strings:

>>> import difflib
>>> difflib.SequenceMatcher(None, s, s2, False).ratio()
0.9795918367346939
>>> difflib.SequenceMatcher(None, s, s3, False).ratio()
0.8
>>> difflib.SequenceMatcher(None, s, s4, False).ratio()
0.46808510638297873

So SequenceMatcher was able to detect that s and s2 are very similar (98%), and apart from a typo in ...