String similarity algorithms?

Question

I need to compare 2 strings and calculate their similarity, to filter down a list of the most similar strings.

Eg. searching for \"dog\" would return

1. d

Answer 1

It seems you are needing some kind of fuzzy matching. Here is java implementation of some set of similarity metrics http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~sam/stringmetrics.html. Here is more detailed explanation of string metrics http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wcohen/postscript/ijcai-ws-2003.pdf it depends on how fuzzy and how fast your implementation must be.