Element-wise string comparison

Abstraction: Python approaches for character-by-character string equality comparison

Key points:

• izip_longest from itertools handles strings of different lengths, padding shorter string with None (returns 0 for mismatch with missing char)
• List comprehension with slice notation text1[i:i+1] handles length differences without import: empty slice returns "" which compares False
• NumPy approach: p.fromstring(s, dtype=p.int8) converts strings to integer arrays enabling vectorized comparison, requires manual padding for unequal lengths
• Result convention: 1 for matching characters, 0 for mismatching or missing positions

Connections: Stackoverflow · Python Programming · String Processing

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14166358/element-wise-string-comparison