How to allow regex match with one character wrong

Question

I'm trying to figure out if there's an easy way to have a particular regex give matches that are correct except for one character. (Working in PHP if that matters).

For example, for the pattern 'apples', I want to find not only occurrences of "apples" but also "appxes", "opples", "applis", etc.

Is there any good way to accomplish this? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Use levenshtein function instead of regex. Here are the docs.

On example echo levenshtein("abcd","abce") prints out: 1.

Edit: Please also note that this function will compare strings of different lengths, so additional check could be needed. See @Vulcan's comment below.

Answer 2

Your regex string:

[A-z]pples|A[A-z]ples|Ap[A-z]les|Appl[A-z]es|Appl[A-z]s|Apple[A-z]