Java: Does anyone have method to find best match of string in array?

Question

Basically I'm just trying to find a way to find the closest match (not necessarily exact) of a String

For example, find "delicous" in {"pie", "delicious", "test"}

This is pretty obvious, but the values in the array might not always be that distinct.

Could someone please help me with a way to achieve this.

Answer 1

Depends on how you define "closest" but one common way is by using a Levenshtein Distance score. Apache Commons has such a method in StringUtils.

From there your search method basically becomes: find the string in the collection which has the smallest Levenshtein distance for a given input.

Answer 2

There's nothing built into Java for that. You might try a third-party library like SecondString or FREJ.