REGEX matches with 100% confidence, what about 99%?

Question

in my app a user is able to enter text, which later I then search from and extract based on future submission.

Problem is users can sometimes have a type or forget a period, etc...

is there a way in ruby to say match with X% confidence level?

Meaning if the match goal is 500 characters, and a match was found with 490 characters, match it, versus not matching anything?

Thanks

Answer 1

In this case, regular expressions aren't your best tool. Maybe something like Levenshtein distance instead?

Answer 2

I read about the Tre library recently, sounds like what you are looking for:

http://laurikari.net/tre/