fuzzywuzzy

I used fuzzywuzzy [1], a python-based fuzzy string matching calculator that is based on Levenshtein's edit-distance for a parking enforcement product I built. The product used an iOS client to capture license plates. The app would capture a single plate many times, de-duplicate using an edit-distance threshold matching plates up to a time period lookback. Then among those plates, send the one with the highest likely correct read up to the server. The web app would look to see if that plate had been seen before or a plate similar had been seen before. If so, it would join a "plate group" which let you see the history of vehicle sightings. A set of rules could be created to show vehicle in violation of a posted parking time limit. It worked when a person on patrol walked the lot twice and the app saw the "same" vehicle (thanks to edit dista

Former fuzzywuzzy maintainer here. We relicensed fuzzywuzzy mostly because I am not a lawyer and really just wanted to stop having the same argument with the same three people about whether what we were doing was legal. I actually think that we were violating the license by not including the license header on the included file, but were fine with the rest of the project being MIT, but again, not a lawyer, and the emails from the same ~3 people were becoming quite annoying. Link here: https://github.com/seatgeek/fuzzywuzzy/issues/130 That said, if their interpretation is right, then unless you clean-roomed the reimplementation, that derivative is also GPL. Again, not a conversation I personally care for, and I no longer work for SeatGeek so it's no longer really on me :)

Looking at the source, RapidFuzz has reimplemented FuzzyWuzzy's similarity calculations in C++: https://github.com/rhasspy/rapidfuzz/blob/c225979db3b02caccb... https://github.com/seatgeek/fuzzywuzzy/blob/2188520502b86375... I think (IANAL) that that clears it up - not using the same code, but the same algorithm.

This is more or less the path we take for event matching at SeatGeek[1] using our fuzzywuzzy[2] library. There are places where this falls flat since it's kind of naive, though at that point you can stop thinking about adjacent characters and start thinking about adjacent words. [1] http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/fuzzywuzzy-fuzzy-string-matchi... [2] https://github.com/seatgeek/fuzzywuzzy

A bit off topic, but seatgeek seems like a really impressive engineering organization. They pump out some seriously useful code and articles. Examples: http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/oauth-support-for-nginx-with-l... https://github.com/seatgeek/sixpack https://github.com/seatgeek/fuzzywuzzy https://github.com/seatgeek/djjob https://github.com/seatgeek/soulmate http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/spatial-data-structures-for-be... That's enough ass kissing for me. But they deserve some serious props for all the open source work they're doing.

Another approximate matching library is FuzzyWuzzy[1]. It has some handy functions and seems easier to use. Although might not be as powerful as this. 1. https://github.com/seatgeek/fuzzywuzzy