Re: What is fuzzy matching?

Hi Tony,

On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 3:07 AM Tony Mechelynck
<antoine.mechelynck@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The help for :vimgrep (in quickfix.txt with "Last change: 2021 Feb
> 05", maybe that date is in error) now mentions an [f] flag without
> saying what it does. One recent vim_dev thread makes me think that
> with the 'f' flag "fuzzy matching" is used. So I used :helpgrep
> \<fuzzy\> and found several mentions of fuzzy matching, but AFAICT
> they all assume that the reader knows what fuzzy matching is. Nowhere
> did I see the expression defined. So what is fuzzy matching?
>

We should add a description for "fuzzy matching" to the Vim help.
I will send out a PR.

Fuzzy matching refers to matching strings using non-exact matches.
For example, when you search for the 'get pat' string using fuzzy
matching, it will match the strings 'GetPattern', 'PatternGet',
'getPattern', 'patGetter', 'getSomePattern', 'MatchpatternGet' etc.

:echo matchfuzzy(['GetPattern', 'PatternGet', 'getPattern',
'patGetter', 'getSomePattern', 'MatchpatternGet'], 'get pat')
['patGetter', 'GetPattern', 'PatternGet', 'getPattern',
'getSomePattern', 'MatchpatternGet']

Fuzzy matching will match a string, if all the characters in the search
string are present in the string in the same order. Case is ignored during
the search. Other characters can be present between two characters
in the search string. If the search string has multiple words, then each word
is matched separately. So the words in the search string can be present in
any order in a string.

Fuzzy matching assigns a score for each match based on some criteria.
The match with the highest score is returned first.

Regards,
Yegappan

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