title: is it possible to do fuzzy match merge with python pandas?
body: <p>I have two DataFrames which I want to merge based on a column. However, due to alternate spellings, different number of spaces, absence/presence of diacritical marks, I would like to be able to merge as long as they are similar to one another.</p>
  
  <p>Any similarity algorithm will do (soundex, Levenshtein, difflib's). </p>
  
  <p>Say one DataFrame has the following data:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df1 = DataFrame([[1],[2],[3],[4],[5]], index=['one','two','three','four','five'], columns=['number'])
  
         number
  one         1
  two         2
  three       3
  four        4
  five        5
  
  df2 = DataFrame([['a'],['b'],['c'],['d'],['e']], index=['one','too','three','fours','five'], columns=['letter'])
  
        letter
  one        a
  too        b
  three      c
  fours      d
  five       e
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Then I want to get the resulting DataFrame</p>
  
  <pre><code>       number letter
  one         1      a
  two         2      b
  three       3      c
  four        4      d
  five        5      e
  </code></pre>