Sometimes, we want to do fuzzy string comparison with Python.

In this article, we’ll look at how to do fuzzy string comparison with Python.

How to do fuzzy string comparison with Python?

To do fuzzy string comparison with Python, we can use difflib.

For instance, we write

import difflib

matches = difflib.get_close_matches('appel', ['ape', 'apple', 'peach', 'puppy'])

to call difflib.get_close_matches with the search string and an array of possible matches.

get_close_matches returns a list of close matches from the strings in the list in the 2nd argument.

We can also call get_close_matches with keyword.kwlist by writing

import difflib
import keyword

matches = get_close_matches('wheel', keyword.kwlist)

keyword.kwlist is the list of keywords to search in to get close matches.

Concluson

To do fuzzy string comparison with Python, we can use difflib.