I would like to compare two strings and get some score how much these look alike. For example "The sentence is almost similar" and "The sentence is similar".
I'm not familiar with existing methods in Java, but for PHP I know the levenshtein function.
Are there better methods in Java?
The Levensthein distance is a measure for how similar strings are. Or, more precisely, how many alterations have to be made that they are the same.
The algorithm is available in pseudo-code on Wikipedia. Converting that to Java shouldn't be much of a problem, but it's not built-in into the base class library.
Wikipedia has some more algorithms that measure similarity of strings.
Shameless plug, but I wrote a library also:
https://github.com/vickumar1981/stringdistance
It has all these functions, plus a few for phonetic similarity (if one word "sounds like" another word - returns either true or false unlike the other fuzzy similarities which are numbers between 0-1).
Also includes dna sequencing algorithms like Smith-Waterman and Needleman-Wunsch which are generalized versions of Levenshtein.
I plan, in the near future, on making this work with any array and not just strings (an array of characters).
