Find closest match to input string in a list of strings

Question

I have problems finding an implementation of closest match strings for .net

I would like to match a list of strings, example:

input string: \"Publiczna Szkoła Po

Answer 1

.NET does not supply anything out of the box - you need to implement a an Edit Distance algorithm yourself. For example, you can use Levenshtein Distance, like this:

// This code is an implementation of the pseudocode from the Wikipedia,
// showing a naive implementation.
// You should research an algorithm with better space complexity.
public static int LevenshteinDistance(string s, string t) {
    int n = s.Length;
    int m = t.Length;
    int[,] d = new int[n + 1, m + 1];
    if (n == 0) {
        return m;
    }
    if (m == 0) {
        return n;
    }
    for (int i = 0; i <= n; d[i, 0] = i++)
        ;
    for (int j = 0; j <= m; d[0, j] = j++)
       ;
    for (int i = 1; i <= n; i++) {
        for (int j = 1; j <= m; j++) {
            int cost = (t[j - 1] == s[i - 1]) ? 0 : 1;
            d[i, j] = Math.Min(
                Math.Min(d[i - 1, j] + 1, d[i, j - 1] + 1),
                d[i - 1, j - 1] + cost);
        }
    }
    return d[n, m];
}

Call LevenshteinDistance(targetString, possible[i]) for each i, then pick the string possible[i] for which LevenshteinDistance returns the smallest value.