How to make spelling does not count in Ruby?

Question

    if @msg =~ /facebook/i
        puts "Nice job, you got it!"
    end

I want to make a trivia game that would somehow do not care about spelling count if a person typed in facebook as the answer to the game.

if someone accidentally typed in faceboko, fecabook, or ftckbook, it would work and give an output of "Nice job, you got it!"

I don't know how I would start it.

You can use edit distance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_distance — squiguy, Jul 18 '16 at 23:44

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

Generally Levenshtein distance is used to handle such problems.

You can implement your own solution - but there is a good gem which uses native C bindings.

Define an error rate (e.g. 4) and check the distance between user input and original string.

2.2.2 :001 > require "levenshtein"
 => true 
2.2.2 :002 > Levenshtein.distance("facebook", "ftcebook")
 => 1

So, if you use this, your code will become,

err = 4
if Levenshtein.distance("original", @msg)>err
  "Nice job"
end

1 Answers1