st: Repeated names in a string variable, but some have typos. How to correct?

[Lucas Ferreira Mation <lucasmation@gmail.com>]

statalisters,

I have a large addresses database, identifying street_names,  street_number
and city, which I need to collapse by street_name and city. Because the
street_names can have some typos for some street_numbers, when I collapse
some streets appear duplicated within cities (see example bellow)
Duplicated street_names between cities would be OK.

Is there a command to do some sort of probabilistic/fuzzy string comparison
among the rows of a string variable (similar to what reclink does but
with-in the variable)?

The dataset is quite large, after collapsing I get 2.3 million
cit-street_name pairs. So I need a smart way to go about it.


*Example of the data after collapsing:
clear
input str1 city str24 street_name number_of_obs
"A" "Rua Santos Dumont" 1200
"A" "Rua Santos Dummont" 30
"A" "Rua Satos Dumont" 3
"A" "Rua Bandim" 60
"B" "Rua Pedro Alvares Cabral" 4000
"B" "Rua Pedro Alvaers Cabral" 3
"B" "Rue Pedro Alvares Cabral" 1
"B" "Av. Pedro Alvares Cabral" 20
"B" "Rua other"  45
end
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