find the nearest text match

Hi,

I have two big lists of banks that I can only match them by names, However, these names sometimes are not 100% identical. For example: in list 1: "Deutsche Bank" ,"Morgan Stanley" are in list 2:"Deutsche Banc" ,"Morgan Stanley & Co" . Is it possible to find the nearest text match for each name in list 2 to the names in list 1?

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

What you want is called "fuzzy string matching", and is not a trivial task. I poked around the File Exchange, and didn't find much. This seemed like the most promising candidate:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/6070-fpat-a-fuzzy-pattern-detector