comparison of two strings and returning the one most similar

Question

I have to write a function that takes a string as argument and compair this string to two other strings and return the string most similar and the number of differences.

def func("LUMB"):
    lst=["JIBM", "NUNE", "NUMB"]
should return:
("NUMB",1)

I have tried:

def f(word):
    lst=["JIBM", "NUNE", "NUMB"]
    for i in lst:
        d=k(word, lst)
        return differences
        for n in d:
            print min(sum(n))

where:

def k(word1, word2):
    L=[]
    for w in range(len(word1)):
        if word1[w] != word2[w]:
            L.append(1)
        else:
            L.append(0)
    return L

so that i get a list of eg, [1,0,0,0] if word1="NUMB" and word2="LUMB"

Answer 1

Looks like Shawn Chin has provided the best solution, but if you're prevented from using non-builtin modules, it seems like get_close_matches from difflib might help:

import difflib
difflib.get_close_matches("LUMB", ["JIBM", "NUNE", "NUMB"], 1)

The number of differences can be gotten using the get_opcodes method of SequenceMatcher and working with its return value.