is it possible to do fuzzy match merge with python pandas?

I have two DataFrames which I want to merge based on a column. However, due to alternate spellings, different number of spaces, absence/presence of diacritical marks, I would like to be able to merge as long as they are similar to one another.

Any similarity algorithm will do (soundex, Levenshtein, difflib's).

Say one DataFrame has the following data:

df1 = DataFrame([[1],[2],[3],[4],[5]], index=['one','two','three','four','five'], columns=['number'])

       number
one         1
two         2
three       3
four        4
five        5

df2 = DataFrame([['a'],['b'],['c'],['d'],['e']], index=['one','too','three','fours','five'], columns=['letter'])

      letter
one        a
too        b
three      c
fours      d
five       e

Then I want to get the resulting DataFrame

       number letter
one         1      a
two         2      b
three       3      c
four        4      d
five        5      e

Similar to @locojay suggestion, you can apply difflib's get_close_matches to df2's index and then apply a join:

In [23]: import difflib 

In [24]: difflib.get_close_matches
Out[24]: <function difflib.get_close_matches>

In [25]: df2.index = df2.index.map(lambda x: difflib.get_close_matches(x, df1.index)[0])

In [26]: df2
Out[26]: 
      letter
one        a
two        b
three      c
four       d
five       e

In [31]: df1.join(df2)
Out[31]: 
       number letter
one         1      a
two         2      b
three       3      c
four        4      d
five        5      e

.

If these were columns, in the same vein you could apply to the column then merge:

df1 = DataFrame([[1,'one'],[2,'two'],[3,'three'],[4,'four'],[5,'five']], columns=['number', 'name'])
df2 = DataFrame([['a','one'],['b','too'],['c','three'],['d','fours'],['e','five']], columns=['letter', 'name'])

df2['name'] = df2['name'].apply(lambda x: difflib.get_close_matches(x, df1['name'])[0])
df1.merge(df2)

Using fuzzywuzzy

Since there are no examples with the fuzzywuzzy package, here's a function I wrote which will return all matches based on a threshold you can set as a user:

Example datframe

df1 = pd.DataFrame({'Key':['Apple', 'Banana', 'Orange', 'Strawberry']})
df2 = pd.DataFrame({'Key':['Aple', 'Mango', 'Orag', 'Straw', 'Bannanna', 'Berry']})

# df1
          Key
0       Apple
1      Banana
2      Orange
3  Strawberry

# df2
        Key
0      Aple
1     Mango
2      Orag
3     Straw
4  Bannanna
5     Berry

Function for fuzzy matching

def fuzzy_merge(df_1, df_2, key1, key2, threshold=90, limit=2):
    """
    :param df_1: the left table to join
    :param df_2: the right table to join
    :param key1: key column of the left table
    :param key2: key column of the right table
    :param threshold: how close the matches should be to return a match, based on Levenshtein distance
    :param limit: the amount of matches that will get returned, these are sorted high to low
    :return: dataframe with boths keys and matches
    """
    s = df_2[key2].tolist()
    
    m = df_1[key1].apply(lambda x: process.extract(x, s, limit=limit))    
    df_1['matches'] = m
    
    m2 = df_1['matches'].apply(lambda x: ', '.join([i[0] for i in x if i[1] >= threshold]))
    df_1['matches'] = m2
    
    return df_1

Using our function on the dataframes: #1

from fuzzywuzzy import fuzz
from fuzzywuzzy import process

fuzzy_merge(df1, df2, 'Key', 'Key', threshold=80)

          Key       matches
0       Apple          Aple
1      Banana      Bannanna
2      Orange          Orag
3  Strawberry  Straw, Berry

Using our function on the dataframes: #2

df1 = pd.DataFrame({'Col1':['Microsoft', 'Google', 'Amazon', 'IBM']})
df2 = pd.DataFrame({'Col2':['Mcrsoft', 'gogle', 'Amason', 'BIM']})

fuzzy_merge(df1, df2, 'Col1', 'Col2', 80)

        Col1  matches
0  Microsoft  Mcrsoft
1     Google    gogle
2     Amazon   Amason
3        IBM         

Installation:

Pip

pip install fuzzywuzzy

Anaconda

conda install -c conda-forge fuzzywuzzy