Looking for way to match variations of text ...

[Souperman]

Hey guys

I'm rewriting my trivia script and I'm looking for some way to match answers on a less strict basis. Does anyone know of a Tcl or module which will match text for different spelling (e.g. it will see "color" and "colour" as equivalents, etc.)?

[ppslim]

There are afew ways to to this.

You could use a multiple answer database.

Depending on how you store your questions, you would store multiple answers to the question.

EG

Code: Select all

set Q1 "Orange is a:color,colour,fruit"
proc matchanswer {text} {
  global Q1
  foreach a [split [lindex [split $Q1] 1] ,] {
    if {[string tolower $a] == [string tolower $$text]} {
      return 1
    }
  }
  return 0
}

[Souperman]

Yes, I'm probably going to include support for multiple answers as a lot of people have asked about it.

I'm thinking maybe some sort of "dictionary" where I can map words like color=colour and maybe common misspellings as well. Trivia shouldn't be a spelling contest in my opinion, if someone essentially has the right answer, they should get credited for it, not lose out because of minor spelling errors.

[stdragon]

For misspellings you can use something like the metaphone algorithm.

[Souperman]

Sounds good indeed. Any idea if there's a Tcl implementation somewhere out there? I saw that there was an implementation in C ... now if only I knew C, I could make an eggdrop metaphone.mod