I encountered a case where I am trying to match "HIDESST1" and "HIDESCT1" against ["HIDEDST1", "HIDEDCT1", "HIDEDCT2", "HIDEDCT3"]
Well, they both hit "HIDEDST1" as the first match which is not exactly the result I was looking for. I don't understand why "HIDESCT1" would not hit "HIDEDCT1" as a first choice. Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Thu, 16 Nov 2006 20:19:50 -0800, John Henry wrote: > > > I did try them and I am impressed. It helped me found a lot of useful > > info. I just want to get a feel as to what constitutes a "match". > > The source code has lots of comments, but they don't explain the basic > algorithm (at least not in the difflib.py supplied with Python 2.3). > > There is no single diff algorithm, but I believe that the basic idea is to > look for insertions and/or deletions of strings. If you want more > detail, google "diff". Once you have a list of differences, the closest > match is the search string with the fewest differences. > > As for getting a feel of what constitutes a match, I really can't make any > better suggestion than just try lots of examples with the interactive > Python shell. > > > > -- > Steven D'Aprano -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list