How to get difference between two words in php

Question

I have a search engine for my website. I have installed a feature like Google's "Did you mean xxx?". It returns corrected string. So, is there a way so that I can compare both of those incorrect and correct strings and bold out the corrected words like Google do?

Here is my code:

 <?php
 function suggestion($word){
    $first_word=substr($word,0,1);
    $first_word=strtoupper($first_word);
    $query="SELECT * FROM words WHERE UPPER(LEFT(name,1))='$first_word'";
    $db_words=mysql_query($query);
    $flag=true;
    while($row_words=mysql_fetch_array($db_words)){
        similar_text($row_words['name'],$word,$percent);
        if(($percent>50)&&($percent!=100)){
            echo '<strong>Did you mean:</strong><br>';
            echo $row_words['name'],'<br>';
            $flag=false;
        }
    }
 }
 ?>

Duplicate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/321294/highlight-the-difference-between-two-strings-in-php — Tim Withers, Aug 30 '12 at 03:20

Lucas Green · Answer 1 · 2012-08-30T03:21:01.253

3

According to the comments below you are looking for something like this:

function corrected($bad, $good, $wholephrase) {
    return preg_replace('#\b'. preg_quote($bad) . '\b#g', '<em>' . htmlspecialchars($good) . '</em>', $wholephrase);
}

For those of you who were interested in how the detection of misspelling and suggestion of alternatives is accomplished take a look here: Levenshtein Distance

edited Aug 30 '12 at 03:21

answered Aug 30 '12 at 03:07

Lucas Green

3,951
22
27

No, I already have got an algorithm using similar_text. Now, I want to make the corrections done in the string to be highlighted. – Gaurav Mishra Aug 30 '12 at 03:14
1

Then it'd be a great idea to actually ***paste*** your code so we can see what you're doing instead of guessing... – jeremy Aug 30 '12 at 03:15

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 30 '12 at 05:06

No one helped me!! ;-(

Here is the code I created:

function suggestion($word){
    $first_word=substr($word,0,1);
    $first_word=strtoupper($first_word);
    $query="SELECT * FROM words WHERE UPPER(LEFT(name,1))='$first_word'";
    $db_words=mysql_query($query);
    $wd=explode(" ",$word);
    while($row_words=mysql_fetch_array($db_words)){
        similar_text($row_words['name'],$word,$percent);
        if(($percent>50)&&($percent!=100)){
            $rw=explode(" ",$row_words['name']);
            $d=array_udiff($rw,$wd,'strcasecmp');
            for($i=0;$i<count($rw);$i++){
                if(in_array($rw[$i],$d)){
                    $rw[$i]="<em>".$rw[$i]."</em>";
                }
            }
            echo '<strong>Did you mean:</strong><br>';
            foreach($rw as $r){
                echo $r," ";
            }
            echo '<br>';
        }
    }
}

How to get difference between two words in php

2 Answers2