how to find matching patterns in strings irrespective of order?

user_7457101 0
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I am trying to match patterns between two strings. For example, I have

pattern_search = ['education four year'] 
string1 = 'It is mandatory to have at least of four years of professional education'
string2 = 'need to have education four years with professional degree'

I am trying a way to say true when i try to find match between pattern_search and string1 & string2.

When I am using regex library match/search/findall doesn't help me. In string i have the all the words required but not in order, in string2 i have one extra word with added plural.

Currently I am splitting the strings checking with each word in pattern_search with each word in string1 & 2 after preprocessing, is there any way to find match between the sentences?

nlp python-3.x regex string
3 Answers

You should take a nice look at the difflib library, specifically the get_close_matches function which returns words that are "close enough" to fill that requirement of words that may not exactly match. Be sure to adjust your threshold (cutoff=) accordingly.

from difflib import get_close_matches
from re import sub

pattern_search = 'education four year'
string1 = 'It is mandatory to have at least of four years of professional education'
string2 = 'need to have education four years with professional degree'
string3 = 'We have four years of military experience'

def match(string, pattern):
  pattern = pattern.lower().split()
  words = set(sub(r"[^a-z0-9 ]", "", string.lower()).split())  # Sanitize input
  return all(get_close_matches(word, words, cutoff=0.8) for word in pattern)

print(match(string1, pattern_search))  # True
print(match(string2, pattern_search))  # True
print(match(string3, pattern_search))  # False

If you want to make pattern_search a list of patterns, then you should probably loop through the match function.

user_17087510

Try it:

def have_same_words(string1, string2):
    return sorted(string1.split()) == sorted(string2.split())

print(have_same_words("It is mandatory to have at least of four years of professional education", "education four year"))
user_22927670

In Python to check if a string contains another string you can try a couple of things:

Use in

>>> pattern_search in string
True

Or find

>>> string1.find(pattern_search)
[returns value greater than 1 if True or -1 if False]
user_110302430
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