What are some strategies for identifying and removing similar values in a table with inconsistent naming conventions?

In order to identify and remove similar values in a table with inconsistent naming conventions, one strategy is to use a combination of string matching techniques and data cleaning functions. This involves comparing values using fuzzy matching algorithms to identify similar values, and then standardizing the naming conventions by applying data cleaning functions to remove inconsistencies. 

// Connect to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Query to select all values from the table
$sql = "SELECT * FROM table_name";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

// Loop through the results
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    // Apply fuzzy matching algorithm to identify similar values
    similar_text($row['column_name'], $row['column_name_to_compare'], $percent);

    // If similarity percentage is above a certain threshold, standardize the naming conventions
    if($percent > 80) {
        $standardized_value = // Apply data cleaning functions to standardize the value
        $update_sql = "UPDATE table_name SET column_name = '$standardized_value' WHERE id = " . $row['id'];
        $conn->query($update_sql);
    }
}

// Close the connection
$conn->close();

Keywords

data cleaning string similarity fuzzy matching regular expressions data manipulation

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