>> There are lots of ways of implementing a soundex, here is one using
>> Firebird stored procedures.
>>
>> http://fbtalk.net/viewtopic.php?id=182
>>
>
> sounds like what i need. i'll check it out.

My first thought was Soundex when I read about your problem. However, it's probably of only little
or no use for you.
Creating the soundex for "a river somewhere" returns A6162 whereas "river somewhere, a" returns
R1625. Those two strings do not seem very similar for the soundex algorithm.

What you need is the "levenshtein distance". This is an algorithm that calculates how many single
characters have to be swapped, added, shifted or left out to get two strings to be the same.

Ask aunt google for it, it returns a heap of sites.

Florian