difflib - Finding close matches of strings from a list

#beginners #python

Say we have a list of strings: _list = [...,] and user input _input = '...', how do we find the items in _list that most closely resemble _input?

Python has a built-in package called difflib with the function get_close_matches() that can help us.

get_close_matches(word, possibilities, n, cutoff) accepts four parameters:

word - the word to find close matches for in our list
possibilities - the list in which to search for close matches of word
n (optional) - the maximum number of close matches to return. Must be > 0. Default is 3.
cutoff (optional) - a float in the range [0, 1] that a possibility must score in order to be considered similar to word. 0 is very lenient, 1 is very strict. Default is 0.6.

An example from the docs:

Python 3.7.3

>>> from difflib import get_close_matches
>>> get_close_matches('appel', ['ape', 'apple', 'peach', 'puppy'])
['apple', 'ape']

The above example can easily be modified to use a custom list _list for possibilities and user input _input for word.

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