Interesting one. I've made good use of Levenshtein distance and variants thereof many times (see Text::Levenshtein), and it will work for sentences as well as it works for words (though you may have some speed issues as the length increases - I don't know how long your text samples are going to be). Off the top of my head I'd think about comparing the current user input to the same length initial substring of the template. A result of 0 means they're exactly copying it, and a result equal to the current string length means they're completely different. Maybe if you could prepare some sample data and your desired output we could get closer to an answer.

--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

In reply to Re: comparing sentences by Albannach
in thread comparing sentences by cntrtrst

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.