Search

Exact search

Find all individuals with the last_name “Groskopf”:

family = table.where(lambda r: r['last_name'] == 'Groskopf')

Fuzzy search by edit distance

By leveraging an existing Python library for computing the Levenshtein edit distance it is trivially easy to implement a fuzzy string search.

For example, to find all names within 2 edits of “Groskopf”:

from Levenshtein import distance

fuzzy_family = table.where(lambda r: distance(r['last_name'], 'Groskopf') <= 2)

These results will now include all those “Grosskopfs” and “Groskoffs” whose mail I am always getting.

Fuzzy search by phonetic similarity

By using Fuzzy to calculate phonetic similarity, it is possible to implement a fuzzy phonetic search.

For example to find all rows with first_name phonetically similar to “Catherine”:

import fuzzy

dmetaphone = fuzzy.DMetaphone(4)
phonetic_search = dmetaphone('Catherine')

def phonetic_match(r):
    return any(x in dmetaphone(r['first_name']) for x in phonetic_search)

phonetic_family = table.where(lambda r: phonetic_match(r))