Question

Fuzzy search in C# or C++

Asked by: hongning2009

Hello experts,  Anyone knows how to do a fuzzy search in C++ or C#?

What I need is that given a fixed sized string,  search within the string for a given search criterion.

However I need the search to be fuzzy.

It means if I am looking for the word combine.

It can search if the word is mistyped like cpmbine or combinw or cmbine.

It would be nice if the function or command could control how fuzzy is the search.  Say only allow one character difference or one character deletion.

Any tips, suggestion, web links, resources would be very helpful.

Thank you

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Asked On
2009-09-01 at 11:26:17ID24698932
Topics

Search Engines

,

C++ Programming Language

,

C# Programming Language

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
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Answers

 

by: jkrPosted on 2009-09-01 at 11:44:15ID: 25234635

This article should help get you going: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/fuzzysearch.aspx ("Fuzzy Search")

 

by: evilrixPosted on 2009-09-01 at 11:50:52ID: 25234695

Maybe SoundEx will help. It is used to match based upon phonetics.
http://www.csharphelp.com/archives2/archive394.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

 

by: hongning2009Posted on 2009-09-01 at 13:55:41ID: 25235953

Thanks for the input, jkr and evilrix.  I've look at the codes, but the problem is that the source string is longer then search string.

Source string can be

" The combined weight is 25 kilograms"

So in levenstein it would usually fail if the search string is a lot shorter.

From the article given by jkr, the author says you could break down the source string to each words.   However the problem is the source string might not have a clear delimiter like space for each word.  Two or more words can be joined together.

If you experts can give me some inputs on this, it will be great.

Thanks

 

by: tmiddletPosted on 2009-09-02 at 16:42:38ID: 25246737

Just wrote a function that should do you job.
Takes a search string and a source string as input and returns the index where the word was found.
Fuzzy up to one character.

int fuzzySearch(char* word, char* source)
{
	int idx = -1;
	bool m1 = false;
	bool found = true;
	int pos = 0;
	while(true)
	{
		found = true;
		for(int i = idx+1; i < strlen(source); i++)
		{
			if(word[0] == source[i])
			{
				idx = i;
				break;
			}
		}
		for(int i = 1; i < strlen(word); i++)
		{
			if(word[i] != source[idx+i])
				if(m1 == false)
					m1 = true;
				else
				{m1 = false;found = false;break;}
		}
		if(found)
			return idx;
		if( pos >= strlen(source))
			return -1;
	}
}

                                              
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by: evilrixPosted on 2009-09-02 at 23:38:11ID: 25248284

Not tested the function... no idea if it works but purely from a performance point of view, having strlen() used as a loop termination predicate is hugely inefficient.

 

by: hongning2009Posted on 2009-09-18 at 13:18:33ID: 31623174

none

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