1 to many string wildcard matching

[DWJames]

Hi all,
how would you go about this task?
I want to produce a list of all file names in column B which ‘belong’ to column A. In this case the file name in column B will begin with the column A value, but I need to find all instances where it matches, so I guess I need to use a command which repeats a wildcard match against every row value in column B for for each row in column A?

needs-matching.xlsx (4.8 KB)

A	B
thing1	thing1.jpg
other3	other3.doc
item3	item3.jpg
	thing1_second image.jpg
	other3-b.gif
	item3-rearthing1.jpg
	thing1_3rd.jpg
	thing1_fourth.jpg
	thing12345.doc
	thing1b.gif

the output can be a column C which contains the column A value which corresponds to the column B value.
I’m also not sure how to handle potential duplicate matches.

regards,
James

[gonhaddock]

Hello @DWJames

You can find useful the following workflow.

Data Wrangling _ Multiple Key-Word Search (logical indexing) – gonhaddock

The only change that would be required will happen in the String Manipulation node (row3):
Instead:
"(?i)(.*?(" ,
For letter case match and beginning of text as your requirement:
"(.?(" ,
BR

[victor_palacios]

I’ve also just done the same task in two different ways (one which will handle multi-matching as well):

Topic Extractor Node

First we lowercase to get the best possible matches as upper and lowercase letters are not the same for computers. Then we use a little regex joining all the search terms together with | (which means “OR” in regex). Search for the word apple or dog ==> apple|dog Similarity Search 2.knar.knwf (52.0 KB) [Screen Shot 2022-04-05 at 12.06.03 PM] [Screen Shot 2022-04-05 at 12.05.48 PM] This solution actually works better on this sample of data, but if you have a lot of misspellings, this won’t…

[DWJames]

Thank you both, that gave me what I needed
In the end my data was more complex, so I had to use a brute force approach…