Determination of equal sounding strings in MySQL is difficult.

The function soundex() for example will not work with number-only strings

select soundex(”2008″)

will result in an empty string.  And this both operations will result in the same soundex-strings:

select soundex(”Windows 2008″), soundex(”Windows 2003″)

both times it returns W532 for me - but in reality these two sounds doesn’t sound equal! 

Also sounds like will return 1 (true) for these two example strings:

select “Windows 2008″ sounds like “Windows 2003″

So what I am searching for? I want to check if two strings are equal, independent from any spaces, so a sql-call should come up with these results:

• “Windows 2008″ vs. ”Windows 2002″ - result 0, different strings
• “Windows    2008″ vs. ”Windows 2003″ - result 0, different strings
• “Windows 2008″ vs. ”Windows       2008″ - result 1, just spaces between existing words are different (this should be no factor)

Still searching for a solution (without checking the soundex word by word)…