Comparing Company Name from 2 diffrent Sources

[bmatrose]

Currently Im getting two files with Company name in it from two diffrent Sources. I would like to run a compare the see if a company resides in both files. The only problem I have is that a company can be not exactly the same. For example a company might be called THE ABC COMPANY LLP and in the other file it might be A.B.C Comp How can I write code to compare these two values and return a positive match if they are similar. Thanks

[Hack]

What kind of files are you getting?

[bmatrose]

.csv

[barni07]

Do you want your computer to tell you that two non-identical values are identical? In other words, would it have to decide which pair of names are similar enough to be considered as the same company... I don't think this is very feasible.

Good luck!

[Pasvorto]

sounds like a good 'artificial intelliegence engine' project

[eranfox]

Reply to bmatrose,
Hello bmatrose,
The file type here is not the issue,
what you want is very hard to do because you can have another company call ABC Company Ltd. and it will be wrong thing to compare the names.

If you know that you dont have 2 companies with the almost same name and you know you have at least 1 word matching (ABC and A.B.C are matching without the dots)
you can make new strings without dots or other signs and see if they matches.

ERAN

[dglienna]

That's not going to work unless you strip out the periods, and use upper case. Then it *might* work.

[eranfox]

Thats the problem with text comparing.
Cant you ask for numeric key or something like that to be added to your csv file?

ERAN