Question

I hope you’ll find this interesting! C# is the preferred language for solutions, or T-SQL.

Consider the following items:

Item 1: NJ2-12GM50-Wö-V13

Item 2: NJ2-12GM50-Wo-V13

You can guess that the individual entering Item 1 copied and pasted, and the individual entering Item 2 just used ‘o’, the closest english character he could find.

When somebody enters a new part number like NJ2-12GM50-Wo-V13, we want to suggest to them that they might mean NJ2-12GM50-Wö-V13.

In order to do so, we want to convert all characters that can be stored as a VARCHAR back to their simplist lower case letter. I’m interested in a solution that converts, for example, ASCII character 246 (ö) to ASCII character 111 (o).

The idea being that if we make a lookup column containing all the converted versions of the partnumbers, we can easily match them to keyboard entry.

Of course, I can make a Dictionary to do it, but I wonder if there is a smarter way.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Probably your best bet is to implement a function in either C# or T-SQL to calculate the Levenshtein distance between the two part numbers.