feat: add similarity function

[aleclarson]

Tip

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Summary

This function calculates the “Levenshtein distance” between two strings, which is a fancy way of saying how many characters did not match. Note that it's case-sensitive.

// Order of arguments has no effect.
similarity('ababab', 'ab') // 4
similarity('ab', 'ababab') // 4

// Exact matches return zero.
similarity('a', 'b') // 1
similarity('a', 'a') // 0

Its most common use case is in quick and dirty “fuzzy matching” solutions. By passing the search query as one argument and the possible match as the other argument, you can score each possible match to determine which is most similar to the search query.

const possibleMatches = ['Apple', 'Pineapple', 'Grapes']
const searchQuery = 'App'

const [bestMatch] = possibleMatches.reduce(
  (best, possibleMatch) => {
    const score = _.similarity(searchQuery, possibleMatch)
    if (score < best[1]) {
      best[0] = possibleMatch
      best[1] = score
    }
    return best
  },
  [undefined, Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY] as const,
)

For any code change,

• Related documentation has been updated, if needed
• Related tests have been added or updated, if needed
• Related benchmarks have been added or updated, if needed

Does this PR introduce a breaking change?

No

Bundle impact

Status	File	Size
A	src/string/similarity.ts	455 1

Footnotes

1. Function size includes the import dependencies of the function. ↩

[github-actions]

A new beta version 12.2.0-beta.83909af has been published to NPM. 🚀

To install:

pnpm add [email protected]

The radashi@beta tag also includes this PR.