String similarity function in XQuery?

[Andrew Welch]

On 6/14/07, David Sewell <http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk> wrote:
> Does anyone have an XQuery function that calculates the similarity of
> two strings? I'm thinking of something along the lines of the Perl
> String::Similarity module:

If 1 per character length difference, plus 1 per character in the
shorter string when compared to the character in the longer string is
sufficient, then this XPath does that:

abs(count($str1) - count($str2)) +
sum(for $x in 1 to min((count($str1), count($str2))) return
  if ($str1[$x] ne $str2[$x]) then 1 else ())

cheers
andrew