Question

Is there any way to do a Approximate text matching in jquery?

I have a div with the correct answer

<div class="correctAnswer" style="display:none;">CORRECT</div>

and i want that when the answer in the input tag is Approximate correct show some text

<input type="text"> //lets guess i type "CORREC"
<div class="Approximate" style="display:none;">Your answer is Approximate correct!</div>

Answer 1

You could use the Levenshtein Distance algorithm to do so, which will give you a score for the similarity of strings.

It is well described on wikipedia and has been used in a lot of different languages/technologies.

The pseudo algorithm is this:

int LevenshteinDistance(string s, string t)
{
  int len_s = length(s), len_t = length(t), cost = 0

  if(s[0] != t[0]) then cost = 1

  if(len_s == 0) then      return len_t
  elseif(len_t == 0) then  return len_s
  else                     return minimum(LevenshteinDistance(s[1..len_s-1], t) + 1,
                                      LevenshteinDistance(s, t[1..len_t-1]) + 1,
                                      LevenshteinDistance(s[1..len_s-1], t[1..len_t-1]) + cost)
}

You may also want to try this javascript implementation on github (which is not mine, BTW).