Levenstein distance for better matching with regexp

[radarek]

I added levenstein calculation for matching with regexp because it returned first matching country and sometimes there was better choice. For example:

old behaviour:

Carmen.country_code("Pol")
=> "PF" # French Polynesia

new behaviour:

Carmen.country_code("Pol")
=> "PL" # Poland

Consider adding merging it to master.
Thank you.

[jim]

This is very cool.

I'm trying to think about when this sort of matching would be the most useful. Can you tell me how you're using it in your app? I'm thinking it might be better as another method or as an optional flag to this method.

I know the regex matching is already in the library, but I'm not totally sure it should be either.

[radarek]

The point of that change is that using current regexp matching mechanism it returns first match which is not always appropriate. Using levenstein algorithm we can increase probability that returned country is better for given value.

I think it's useful when input values come from 3rd party database/datastore/website etc and we can't predict all values, specially shortcuts and typos. For example one can write "Cannada" or "Canda" and we can guess that it's probably "Canada" (levenstein is good for that case). I also gave example with "Pol" where I expected (maybe because I'm from Poland :D) that "Poland" is better than "French Polynesia".

If you want to add it as separate method then I encourage you to move with all regexp matching part because IMHO matching with regexp and choosing first match isn't good.

Hope it helped :).

[jim]

Makes sense. I'm going to move the regex stuff into an optional module, and then I'll incorporate this into it as well.

[nengxu]

+1

[jim]

Closing this as it's been open for 3 years. Smarter fuzzy matching may come at some point in the future if there is demand for it.