This calculates the similarity between two strings as described in Oliver [1993]. Note that this implementation does not use a stack as in Oliver's pseudo code, but recursive calls which may or may not speed up the whole process. Note also that the complexity of this algorithm is O(N**3) where N is the length of the longest string.
By passing a reference as third argument, similar_text() will calculate the similarity in percent for you. It returns the number of matching chars in both strings.
See also levenshtein(), and soundex().