It is a tough case... I think I personally would take this approach.

Store the vendor strings as they are and either store as well with all non alphanum characters removed, or do it while you search (probably the former, if you do a lot of searching).

Match all your words, alphanum only, against the alphanum versions of the vendors... once you have a match, use the individual words in your string to match against the original string. This with the most matches rank highest.

Or maybe even go the other way around... store a word database and assuming you get a couple hits use that to shrink your search list for the alphanum reduced search. This would probably save you a lot of processing since you could use keying to reduce the search load.

Of course, I am sure there are other ways.

                - Ant
                - Some of my best work - (1 2 3)

In reply to Re: Help required in RE strategy by suaveant
in thread Help required in RE strategy by Anonymous Monk

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