approximate-match

Provides approximate string matching. Works intuitively well, compared to say Levenshtein edit distance. Specially works with human typing abbreviations.

Example

var ApproxMatch = require('approximate-match')
var ap = new ApproxMatch;
ap.add('Northwestern University')
ap.match('Nwstrn Univ.') // Northerwestern University

Corpus adding and corpus association

Individual string items that are searched within the corpus can be associated with an object, so that those associations can be retrieved upon matching.

.add(string,value)

Here we associate {foo:'bar'} with "University of Notre Dame"

approx.add('University of Notre Dame',{foo:'bar})

.add(string1, string2, ... value)

We can also add multiple strings as a corpus to associate to a single value

approx.add('UND', 'Notre Dame', 'ND Fighting Irish', {foo:'bar'})

.addObject(object)

If you add an object its fields will be searched over

approx.addObject({key1:'foo', key2:'bar',key3:'baz})
approx.match('foo')
// {key1:'foo', key2:'bar',key3:'baz}

Note that adding an object precludes it from having an associated return object. This may change in the future.

Matching

Ease of Use of the .match function. Weather your corpus has a mix of both string items and objects, .match will search across all of them.

Example:

ap.addObject({foo:'gabby', bar:'cupid'})
ap.addObject({foo:'monsoon', bar:'annie'})
res = ap.match('monsoon')
assert.deepEqual(res[0],{ metric: 7, corpus: { foo: 'monsoon', bar: 'annie' } })
res = ap.match('Northwest')
assert.deepEqual(res[0], { metric: 9, corpus: 'Northwestern University' })

.match(string)

// matching it
approx.match("N'wstrn")
// Northewestern University

If there was an associated object it will be returned as well

.match(string,list)

You can specify certain fields if the internal matching encounters an object The text to be matched will be matched against the keys ordered together.

approx.addObject({ name: 'Abilene Christian University',
mascot: 'Wildcats',
city: 'Abilene',
state: 'Texas'})

approx.match('Abilene Wildcats', ['name','mascot'])
// 'Abilene Wildcats' will be matched against 'Abilene Christian University Wildcats'
// and return that object

Other Methods

.metric(string1,string2)

Want a metric between N'WSTRN and NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY?

var ApproxMatch = require('approximate-match')
var ap = new ApproxMatch;
ap.metric("N'wstrn", "Northerwestern University")
// 8

.setMetric

You can use your own metric or use the convenience metrics available on the require object

var ApproxMatch = require('approximate-match'); var ap = new ApproxMatch;

This is the default, metric_with_discard

ap.setMetric(ApproxMatch.metric_with_discard)

or this metric rewards continual letter-by-letter matching

ap.setMetric(ApproxMatch.metric)