Post reply

Find same sounding emails

  • March 12, 2008 at 6:53 am

    #183896

    Does someone know of a way for me to find all the emails that sound the same?

    for example: user@hotmail.com, user222@hotmail.com, 45user@yahoo.com

    i would like all of these to come up as the "same sounding emails".

    thanks

  • March 12, 2008 at 7:12 am

    #788518

    Look up patindex or charindex in BOL. Perhaps SOUNDEX would work as well.

  • March 12, 2008 at 8:51 am

    #788612

    I can't use patindex. i want it to decide automatically which pat to search for.

  • March 12, 2008 at 9:06 am

    #788633

    I think you'll have to build something on your own for this. Your rules of "what is similar sounding" might be different than someone else's.

    For example, would "rsmith@hotmail.com" be similar to "robs@hotmail.com"? How about "robsmith12@yahoo.com", is that also similar? What about "robinsmithjones@hotmail.com"?

    To a human eye, if you know you're looking for someone named "Robert Smith", the first three would be candidates, but the last one probably isn't. To a computer, you could define a pattern that would get anything where an "r" comes before a "smith" or a "rob" comes before a "s", but that would say that "Robert Smith" = "Robin Smith-Jones" but "Robert Smith" != "Bob Smith" != "Bobby Smith", where what you actually want is all the variations on Robert/Bob/Bobby/Rob, but not the variations on Robin. ("!=" means "is not equal to", in case anyone doesn't already know that.)

    So, I'm not sure what you'll have to do.

    To handle the examples you gave, where the only difference is numbers in the name and a difference in domain, you could compare the part of the string that comes before the "@" symbol, and strip out numbers from that. Might also want to strip out punctuation from it, not sure.

    - Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
    Property of The Thread

    "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon

  • March 12, 2008 at 11:26 am

    #788710

    Thank you for the effort to help.

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply