>I know this is a very old message.. and I see you got lots of good answers. My question is what is the "fuzzy" matching technique.
>I'm not so concerned about interface. I am looking for a good VFP based matching algorithm. e.g. something that recognizes spelling mistakes, maybe strip's out commas, abbreviations, identifies singular vs plural, use a combination of = and like operator, etc.
>
look up Levenshtein on the vfp wiki - I speeded up the version there and a similar approach in C is used with our apps regularly. But be warned: LevenSthein is rather slow, even the C-version (10* faster) takes a lot of computing power.

regards

thomas