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By 'table' it should find 'cable', 'tabular' etc. E.g. like you type the word in type in dictionary and it says may be you wanted word1, word2 which are close in spell to the one I typed.

What is the name of algorithms and approaches used? Any libraries providing the functionality (C/C++, Ruby)?

I need to search by word (dictionary-like application), no phrases, sentences, etc.

Anthony Accioly
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msorc
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  • Libraries would obviously depend on the language you're using, so including that in the question would help to narrow down suggestions to those that are actually useful to you. – Anthony Grist Apr 27 '11 at 15:45
  • Updated to C/C++, Ruby but any other would be interesting to have a look on how it works. – msorc Apr 27 '11 at 19:01
  • Related question: [Regular expression to search for Gadaffi](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5365283/regular-expression-to-search-for-gadaffi) – Andrew Grimm Apr 28 '11 at 00:15

2 Answers2

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As well as Soundex which was developed as far back as 1918 there are also Metaphone and Double Metaphone which were developed in the 1990s and 2000s respectively specifically to be be improvements over Soundex.

hippietrail
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5

You are looking for soundex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex The Wikipedia page list libraries for several programming languages.

Anthony Accioly
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