Percentage match strings with PHP
We have all seen, rather tediously, the matches on sites giving a percentage ranking of releavence to a search. Mostly these come from FULLTEXT searches from databases, but what if we simply want a percentage comparison between two strings? Here we show how simple this is.
<?php
/*** Show how broken it is ***/
error_reporting(E_ALL);
/*** our first text string ***/
$text_a = "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
/*** As string to compare it with ***/
$text_b = "The slow red fox jumps over the lazy cat";
/* check the similarities and put the percentage of
* matches into a variable.
*/
similar_text($text_a, $text_b, $percentMatch);
/*** round off the match and echo ***/
echo round($percentMatch);
?>