Question

I’m trying to find out the ‘best’ option for using levenshtein() in PHP.

I’m using a PDO statement when a user enters a new customer into the DB.

What I want to do is before the new Customer is added have a query search and see if that Customer is already in the database to avoid a possible duplicate entry. I can’t use MATCH/AGAINST as the Customer may have been entered differently either time.

This will check the First Name against the Database….

$input1 = $_POST['FIRSTNAME'];

$result = array();
$count=1;
            $find = $dbh->query('SELECT BillingFirstName FROM Customers');

            while ($row = $find->fetch (PDO::FETCH_ASSOC))
                 {
                    $fn = $row['BillingFirstName'];
                    array_push($result, $fn);
                 }


        foreach ($result as $word) {

                    echo $word.'<br>';

                        $shortest = -1;
                        $lev = levenshtein($input1, $word);

                    if ($lev == 0) {

                        $closest = $word;
                        $shortest = 0;
                        break;
                    }

                    if ($lev <= $shortest || $shortest < 0) {

                        $closest  = $word;
                        $shortest = $lev;
                    }

            }


        echo "Input word: $input1\n";
        if ($shortest == 0) {
            echo "Exact match found: $closest\n";
        } else {
            echo "Did you mean: $closest?\n";
        }

How would I add the rest of the details, like Last Name, Address, State, Zip.

Can I even add more or would I need to create the array and loop it with each part of the address?

Answer 1

that would be incredibly slow especially if the db is of any size, what you should use is a levenshtein function in MySQL(not php)

here is a good one: Levenshtein distance