Duplicate Names

aspect

Hi folks,

I am a beginner at PhP (2 months) and I have a coding prob which i will try and explain..

I am devolping a site where users can submit game music, game screenies, and game reviews... The submissions are done on the relevant pages.. i.e Music, GFX and Reviews

My problem is this ;

When a user submits an item (any of the 3 above) he must specify a GAME NAME

If any other submitted item is of the same game name, it is assigned the same 'game_id'

Now this sounded easy untill i realised that my very simple checker let lots of problems slip through the net...

for example if someone submits an item using
Monty on the Run
as the game name

and then someone else submits an item using
Montey on the Run or Montys on the run
then it generates another game_id

basically what i need is a routine that checks if a phrase is close to another in general.

I tried a routine that checked on a letter by letter basis - returning a percentage of the letters which in the new WORD and the OLD WORDS but then problems arose with anagrams such as
'ANOTHER WORLD' and TENCHU WARLORD' both retro games, totally different tho.

If anyone has a concrete routine which will sort mi problem, i would be very grateful.

Thanks in advance 🙂

Shrike

What your asking to achieve is quite a difficult task, because there are so many permutations to look out for. I'd suggest that you may want to rethink how you organise the information. Perhaps before saving a new game, you show all games in the database starting with the letter 'M' and leave it up to the user to either select a category, or make a new one.

MarkR

Probably your best bet is to find similar-ish ones, and let the user choose if the game they are submitting is the same.

Soundex might be useful - this is an algorithm built into PHP which attempts to produce a code based on how English words "sound". It's not perfect, but produces similar (sometime identical) results for similar inputs.

Mark

aspect

Originally posted by Shrike
Perhaps before saving a new game, you show all games in the database starting with the letter 'M' and leave it up to the user to either select a category, or make a new one.

This sounds like a good idea but they could still be lazy and whack thier name in anyways. perhaps a page where it shows any similar ones then says

Do you want to choose one of the above names or your own?

Anywayz, thanks peeps..

I will post my URL once its finished for any retro game fans to come and have a nosey.. 🙂 sorry for da plug !

Thanks again