Compare response and name list in experiment

[deanhystad]

I can see where this code would be confusing since it contains errors and what it does is really odd.

def checkIfContains(name, response):
 
    name = name.lower();
    response = response.lower();
 
    # This code creates a bunch of substrings, all 5 characters in length,
    # except the last substring that is only 4 characters in length because
    # the range is wrong Should be "for i in range(len(response)-4)"
    stringFragments = []
    for i in range(0,len(response)-3):
        stringFragments.append(response[i:i+5])
 
    hasSubstring = False;
 
    # This error fixes the previous error by ignoring the last
    # substring.  Should be
    # for substr in stringFragments:
    #     if substr in name:
    #         return True
    # return False
    for i in range(0,len(stringFragments)-1):
            if stringFragments[i] in name:
                    hasSubstring = True;
    return hasSubstring

I do not understand what the code is supposed to do and I don't think this logic does it. The code creates a bunch of 5 character long strings and returns True if any of those substrings are in name. If you are trying to do a near match (match strings that are close to the same), take a look at difflib. There are also a lot of python libraries used in natural language processing that handle this problem (look for "string distance")