Checking for duplicate entries in a database.

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Hello,

What I have is a list of golf courses which have been imported from several different sources into one database.

What I want to do is run a program on that database which will display the courses that it thinks are possible duplicates so that I will have a list I can check and then manually delete all the real duplicates. The problem is the name of the course may be listed slightly differently such as

'Pebble Beach Golf Course' or 'Course at Pebble Beach' etc

is there a easy way to attempt to select out and display all the potential duplicates?

Note: Like I said accuracy and speed of the program are unimportant.....it just needs to be somewhat accurate so that I dont have to manually look through all 50,000 courses myself.

Thanks for all your help....
Kevin

[tomhath]

Put the names in an array, loop through each name, compare it to the other names from the current position to the end.

I'd strip out common words and see how many distinctive words the two names have in common, something like this:

<?php

function try2 ($name1, $name2, $cutoff) {

  $common_words = array("/golf|course|club/i");

  $pattern = "/" . join ("|", preg_split("/\s+/", trim (preg_replace ($common_words, ' ', $name1)))) . "/i";

  if ( preg_match_all ($pattern, $name2, $matches) >= $cutoff ) {
    echo $name1 . ' <- match? -> ' . $name2  . '<p>';
  } 
  else {
    echo $name1 . ' <- not even close -> ' . $name2 . '<p>';
  }  

}

try2( "pebble beach golf course", "Course at Pebble Beach", 1);

try2( "Herbies golf course", "Course at Pebble Beach", 1);

?>

[tomhath]

The forum software ate the backslash here: preg_split("/\s+/"...

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Thanks a lot for the help!

I am working on using the code right now!

Thanks again!
Kevin