Re: st: matching strings on words

[Simon <scmoore.lists@googlemail.com>]

I've had a similar issue:

http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2008-08/msg00477.html

Simon




On 30/03/2010 20:00, Jeph Herrin wrote:
> I'm not sure what to call this - if I did, I might have
> better luck with my searches for a utility. Basically,
> I want to do something similar to the utility -nmatch-
> which matches first and last names, but I have more than
> two words per record.
>
> The problem: I have two files with lists of hospital names.
> Hospital names tend to consist of multiple words, that get
> used to different extent; the same hospital might be listed
> as:
>
> st joseph's
> st joseph's memorial
> st joseph's memorial hospital
> st joseph's memorial hospital of danbury
>
> etc. (There is also a lot variation on eg "Saint vs "St." and
> "Memorial" vs "memorial", but I have trapped most of those
> already.)
>
> What I'd like to do is match these on "words", and generate
> a _merge variable which indicates how many words match vs
> how many words there are. Then I (or some unlucky grad student)
> can trawl through the matches and decide which ones are the
> same hospital.
>
> I can see how to write a program to do such a thing, but am hoping
> there is already a solution out there that I overlooked?
>
> thanks,
> Jeph
>
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