String Match Question

[NZ_Kiwis]

I'm getting news from various different RSS feeds, before adding the news item to my database i'm doing a Title match to make sure it's not already on the database however some RSS suppliers have the same title but add (source) after is for example

PHP Is Cool
PHP Is Cool (phpbuilder.com)
PHP Is Cool (php.net)

it's all the same news item, can I do a match comparision or something where if it's a 80% match to do one thing else do another thing?

[Desdinova]

you can take a look at levenshtein() to get the difference in strings in a number. I suppose you can work out an algorithm to get the levenshtein result as a percentage.

for instance:
$levenshtein = levenshtein($title1, $title2);

$percentage = $levenshtein / strlen($title1) * 100;
if ($percentage > 10){
return;
}

[Desdinova]

It's probably not gonna be enough though.

Alternatively, or maybe in combination with, you can take a look at strpos, which will check the occurrence of a string in another string. This way you match for instance the beginning of the string to another string.

Another option would be to see if you can easily filter the source out of the title for a more consistent match.