Comparing two lists and finding 'similar' values

Hi all, I've been wanting something like this for a while and thought I would start working on it but it seems like a bit of a big task to me so thought I would ask for your input.

I won't bother going into boring detail about why I need this but..

If we have 2 columns - column 1 contains a list of peoples names and column 2 also contains a list of peoples names but with a lot of bad spellings.

So column 1 would have 'John Smith' and column 2 would have 'Jhon Smith'.

I could do with some kind of code that could compare both lists and identify those in column 2 that have almost identical entries in column 1.

I was thinking about maybe scanning each character in each cell and giving them a value based on what character and also what position the character is in.

Would anyone have any better ideas for this?

Thanks
John

It seems to me you are looking for Levenshtein distance.

Fuzzy logic

Levenshtein distance