similar_text Calculate the similarity between two strings intsimilar_text stringfirst stringsecond floatpercent This calculates the similarity between two strings as described in Oliver [1993]. Note that this implementation does not use a stack as in Oliver's pseudo code, but recursive calls which may or may not speed up the whole process. Note also that the complexity of this algorithm is O(N**3) where N is the length of the longest string. By passing a reference as third argument, similar_text will calculate the similarity in percent for you. It returns the number of matching chars in both strings.