It looks like the text gem has a lot of good implementations of these algorithms. I'm going to throw a bunch of test data at this and see what happens. Metaphone, soundex and levenshtein all seem promising...
I'm concerned that if the change were, say a change of address or a change of phone number, the test mentioned below would fail erroneously, allowing a duplicate into the database. However, names often stay the same. Eeeek, except when people change them because of marriage or personal preference. Hmmmmm. Am I overthinking this?
Thanks,
Steve
Philip Hallstrom-8 wrote: