CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstring-matchingdifflib
Grzegorz Witek
Grzegorz Witek

Reputation: 13

Find closest string match from list

I would like to troubleshoot an incorrect user input. It's exactly about finding the closest match from the "database".

database = ["dog", "cat", "bird"]
user_input = ["dog", "ccat", "ddogg", "horse", "fish"]
for i in user_input:
   match = difflib.get_close_matches('i', words)
match

But I get an empty list. Is there any simple solution to this problem? I haven't found anywhere how to get the result to the list using difflib.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3818

Answers (1)

Moinuddin Quadri
Moinuddin Quadri

Reputation: 48077

Simpler way to achieve this is using list comprehension:

import difflib
database = ["dog", "cat", "bird"]
user_input = ["dog", "ccat", "ddogg", "horse", "fish"]

new_list = [difflib.get_close_matches(word, database) for word in user_input]

where new_list holds the closest match of word from user_input based on values from database as:

[['dog'], ['cat'], ['dog'], [], []]

Issue with your code is that you are passing i as string 'i' to get_close_matches function. Pass it as variable, and then append the match word to the list. For example, here's the working version of the code:

new_list = []
for i in user_input:
    match = difflib.get_close_matches(i, database)
                                  #   ^ don't pass this as string
    new_list.append(match)

# new_list: [['dog'], ['cat'], ['dog'], [], []]

Upvotes: 4

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