Hello all. I'm using String::Approx to find the best match for a given string against a list of candidates. Following the module's POD, here's my code: 

    # get best match by getting relative distances and 
    # taking the lowest value
    my %dist;
    @dist{@input} = map { abs } adistr($target, @input);
    my ($best) = sort { $dist{$a} <=> $dist{$b} } @input;

    # re-check match to make sure it's good enough
    if ($best and amatch($target, $best)) {
       # got a match...
    } else {
       # no such luck.
    }

[download]

My problem is that String::Approx isn't picking the best match in many cases. For example, given: 

    $target = 'source';
    @inputs = qw(donor_dedupe_source
                 indicted_video_source
                 source1);

[download]

the code picks "donor_dedupe_source" instead of "source1". That's because String::Approx considers them to be equally perfect matches, giving them both a adistr score of 0.

What's the best way to solve this? I could do another pass over scores with equal values sorting by closeness to length($target), but that seems gross.

-sam

In reply to Tuning an approximate match to prefer closer lengths by samtregar

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