Question

I was looking for some good options for fuzzy comparison in Rails.

Essentially, I have a set of strings that I’d like to compare against some strings in my database and I’d like to get the closest one if applicable. In this particular case, I’m not so interested in detecting letters out of order/mis-spellings, but rather the ability to ignore extraneous words (extra information, punctuation, words like: the, and, it etc) and pick out the best match. These strings will usually be somewhere between 2-7 words long.

What would you suggest is the best gem/method of doing that? I’ve looked at amatch (http://flori.github.com/amatch/doc/index.html) but I was wondering what else was out there.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Have a look and a play with Thinking Sphinx http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/
I can heartily recommend it
There is also a superb Railscast on how to use it here

http://railscasts.com/episodes/120-thinking-sphinx

Otherwise use ARel – but you are going to have to implement your own fuzzy logic (Not something I’d recommend)