CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpstringcomparison
Marco Bernardini
Marco Bernardini

Reputation: 705

String comparison with multiple words in PHP

I'm still working on my library database.

With PHP, how can I compare strings with multiple words in a different order, like Gaius Julius Caesar and Caesar Gaius Julius to see if they match? Commas, dashes, double spaces etc. will be removed before the comparison.

To place the strings into two arrays and to check with in_array() if every element of the first one is comprised in the second one could be a reasonable solution for a single couple of strings, but it seems a waste of CPU to check a list of over 5,000 names from a MariaDB table (5,000 × 5,000 = 25,000,000 of comparisons).

Suggestions?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 118

Answers (1)

n-dru
n-dru

Reputation: 9440

Do it like this:

$a = "Gaius Julius Caesar";
$b = "Caesar Gaius Julius Putin";
$ar1 = explode(' ', $a);
$ar2 = explode(' ', $b);
$ar3 = array_intersect($ar1, $ar2);
print_r($ar3);

Yields

Array ( [0] => Gaius [1] => Julius [2] => Caesar )

Too see if they match - just compare their count()

Upvotes: 1

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