Question

I have two vectors containing strings. I want to compare each string of vector1 with each string of vector2 and check how many words are the same in both strings. The code I have only works if the two strings are perfectly similar :

Compare::Compare(vector<string> text1, vector<string> text2, int ratio)
{
    text1Size_ = text1.size();
    text2Size_ = text2.size();

    if(text1Size_ > text2Size_)
    {
        totalWords_ = text1Size_;
    }
    else
    {
        totalWords_ = text2Size_;
    }

    it = text1.begin();

    for(int i = 0; i < text1Size_; i++)
    {
        it2 = text2.begin();

        for(int i = 0; i < text2Size_; i++)
        {
            if(*it == *it2)
            {
                cout << "Perfect match";
            }
            it2++;
        }
        it++;
    }
}

I need to return each similar string if they have at least the ratio of similar words.

Is there a easier way than to parse each string, put each word in an array and compare them?

-EDIT-

By word I mean a written word like “bird”. I’ll give an example.

Let says I only have one string per vector and I need a 70% ratio of similarities:

string1 : The blue bird.
string2 : The bird.

What I want to do is to check if there is at least 60% of the written words that match in both sentences.

Here I have “The” and “Bird” that match. So I have 2/3 similar words (66.666%). So theses strings will be accepted.

-EDIT 2-

I don’t think I can use “.compare()” here since it will check each character and not each written word…

Answer 1

Use a string stream to split a string into words:

#include <sstream>

bool is_similar(string str1, string str2)
{
    vector<string> words1, words2;
    string temp;

    // Convert the first string to a list of words
    std::stringstream stringstream1(str1);
    while (stringstream1 >> temp)
        words1.push_back(temp);

    // Convert the second string to a list of words
    std::stringstream stringstream2(str2);
    while (stringstream2 >> temp)
        words2.push_back(temp);

    int num_of_identical_words = 0;
    // Now, use the code you already have to count identical words
    ...

    double ratio = (double)num_of_identical_words / words2.size();
    return ratio > 0.6;
}