string comparison with the most similar string

Question

does anyone know if exist an algorithm that given one string A and an array of strings B, compares the A string with all the strings in B giving in output the most similar o

Answer 1

The usual measurement for this is the Levenshtein distance. Compute the Levenshtein distance from the original to each candidate, and take the smallest distance as the most likely candidate.

Answer 2

Define similarity. Algorithms that can do this include:

1. Levenshtein/LCS/n-gram distance (compare the string with each of the strings in your set, take the one with lowest distance)
2. tf-idf indexing
3. Levenshtein automata
4. Hopfield networks
5. BK-trees

All of which can feasibly by implemented in C or C++. Google "string similarity", "duplicate finding" or "record linkage" for the available metrics and algorithms.

Answer 3

This is usually done with checking a bunch of variations of the string that you have ... take a look at spelling correction algorithms - e.g. here