You will need to calculate the distance for all values in the field to
compare it with the user >input, then pick the small distances and
display them
as options. As the list of values >grows larger, your app will bog
down.
That’s an interesting point: I once used Levenstein distance in a
self-written typo correcting
program, where I used a list of about 200000 English words as a
reference,
and tried
to correct words that couldn’t be found by suggesting words of small
Levenstein distance …
Then it took several minutes to correct a text of 100 pages with quite a
lot
of typos
in it (I corrected each typo only once for all the document), which was
nevertheless acceptable for me in that case.
One could speed this up a little bit by excluding some comparison pairs
right from
the start, because they consist of long and short words which would have
too
great Levenstein distance anyway…
But if you are working on person’s names in a database, I doubt that
there
are going to
be that many different names in them…
Best regards,
Axel