Find closest match in another column

Question

Is there a way to find the closest match to a string? The df has 2 independent columns. user_input is a column with 1000 non-emptyrows. Since there are only 20 possible_fruits, possible_fruits has 980 empty rows.

df
    user_input    possible_fruits
     aapl            apple
     applee          pear
     aaaple          banana
...

Expected Output

user_input  closest_match_in_possible_fruits
aapl            apple      
applee          apple      
aaaple          apple

Does this help: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10018679/python-find-closest-string-from-a-list-to-another-string/10018734 — TUNAPRO1234, Oct 26 '20 at 09:40

Oliver Hnat · Answer 1 · 2020-10-26T11:36:10.717

1

Try using http://docs.python.org/library/difflib.html#difflib.get_close_matches

difflib.get_close_matches(user_input1, possible_fruits)

For the columns do

for i in df:
   answer = difflib.get_close_matches(df['user_input'][i], df['possible_fruits'])
   print (answer)

Edit:

user_input = df['user_input']
possible_fruits = df['possible_fruits']

for i in user_input:
    answer = difflib.get_close_matches(user_input[i], possible_fruits)
    print(answer)

edited Oct 26 '20 at 11:36

answered Oct 26 '20 at 09:44

Oliver Hnat

797
4
19

When I do ```difflib.get_close_matches(df['user_input'], df['possible_fruits'])``` I get [ ] as the output – asd Oct 26 '20 at 10:58
You need to use a for loop to loop through the list – Oliver Hnat Oct 26 '20 at 11:01
But the df has 2 columns. Should I convert each column into a list? – asd Oct 26 '20 at 11:03
KeyError: 'user_input'' – asd Oct 26 '20 at 11:15
I changed it again, changing the df['possible_fruits'][i] to just df['possible_fruits'] – Oliver Hnat Oct 26 '20 at 11:31

Find closest match in another column

1 Answers1