The soundex module

(Optional, 1.5.2 only). This module implements a simple hash algorithm, which converts words to 6-character strings based on their English pronunciation.

As of version 2.0, this module is no longer included. Several Python implementations are available on the net, including this one by Skip Montanaro:

http://orca.mojam.com/~skip/python/soundex.py (dead link)

# File: soundex-example-1.py

import soundex

a = "fredrik"
b = "friedrich"

print soundex.get_soundex(a), soundex.get_soundex(b)

print soundex.sound_similar(a, b)

F63620 F63620
1