Simple PHP string matching pattern

Question

I have two strings I need to compare. Let's say for example that the strings are as follows:

$A = "A fox jumped over the log";
$B = "A fox jumped";

Now how would I compare these two strings in PHP in order to return a percentage of character matching.

So I would like my algorithm to return (for the example above):

10/20 or .5 since $B has exactly half of the matches of the length of $A.

I figured I could iterate through each character, but this seemed a bit tedious and my research indicated that preg_match wouldn't help me much here.

if a character appears twice in the first string but only once in the second string is that 1/2 or 2/2? — acqu13sce
– acqu13sce, Commented Sep 27, 2011 at 23:46
also, does position matter? if you have a fox jumped and _a fox jumped is that a 0% match because the second string is offset by 1? — Jonathan Kuhn
– Jonathan Kuhn, Commented Sep 27, 2011 at 23:52
I updated my question to be more clear. In my case, string B will always be the first part of string A. So I need to detect if a string (lets say string X) is contained within string A. If so, it will look like string B — Nathaniel Wendt
– Nathaniel Wendt, Commented Sep 27, 2011 at 23:52

someone · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-27 23:48:49Z

4

answered Sep 27, 2011 at 23:48

someone

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