If I have two variables, and I want to see how many characters they have in common, what would I do to reach a number of how many were wrong? for example:
a = "word"
b = "wind"
a - b = 2
is there a way to do this or to make what is above work?
Edit: it should also take into account order when calculating
Edit2: All these should turn out as shown bellow
a = bird
b = word
<program to find answer> 2
a = book
b = look
<program to find answer> 3
a = boat
b = obee
<program to find answer> 0
a = fizz
b = faze
<program to find answer> 2
This might not apply for all cases, but if you would like to compare characters you can use set:
a = "word"
b = "wind"
diff = set.intersection(set(a),set(b))
print(len(diff))
>> 2
This ignores sequences as you are grouping them into a set of unique characters.
Another interesting Python standard module library you can use is difflib.
from difflib import Differ
d = Differ()
a = "word"
b = "wind"
[i for i in d.compare(a,b) if i.startswith('-')]
>>['- o', '- r']
difflib essentially provides methods for you to compare sequences such as strings. From the Differ object above, you can compare 2 strings and identify characters which are added or removed to track changes from the string a to string b. In the example given, a list comprehension is used to filter out characters which are removed from a to b, you can also check characters that start with + for characters that are added.
[i for i in d.compare(a,b) if i.startswith('+')]
>>['+ i', '+ n']
Or characters common to both sequence addressing
How to check how many characters a variable has in common with another variable
common = [i for i in d.compare(a,b) if i.startswith(' ')]
print(common, len(common))
>> [' w', ' d'] 2
You can read more about the Differ object here