> > Our usual practice with stuff of uncertain usefulness has been to
> > stick
> > it in contrib for awhile and see if anyone uses it. If there's
> > sufficient interest, we'll promote it to mainstream in a future
> > release.
>
> Makes sense to me. Go, Joe!
>
Per this discussion, here's a patch to implement both levenshtein() and
metaphone() in a contrib. There seem to be a fair number of different
approaches to both of these algorithms. I used the simplest case for
levenshtein which has a cost of 1 for any character insertion, deletion, or
substitution. For metaphone, I adapted the same code from CPAN that the PHP
folks did.
A couple of questions:
1. Does it make sense to fold the soundex contrib together with this one?
2. I was debating trying to add multibyte support to levenshtein (it would
make no sense at all for metaphone), but a quick search through the contrib
directory found no hits on the word MULTIBYTE. Should worry about adding
multibyte support to levenshtein()?
Thanks,
Joe