One of my favorite scenes from the movie Bull Durham is the “Nobody gets woolly” scene:

Crash:  Stop it.

Nuke:  What?

Crash:  It’s not woolly. Nobody gets woolly. Women get weary. They don’t get woolly. Nobody gets “stress.” They’re wearing a “dress.” I hate people that get the words wrong [referring to the song performed by Otis Redding “Try a Little Tenderness”].

That scene has nothing to do with ExtraView, but the word “fuzzy” does, and for some reason that reminds me of “woolly”.

Anyways, ExtraView Quick Find allows you to perform Fuzzy Searches.

Fuzzy searches are used when you don’t know the exact term you are looking for.  For example, perhaps you don’t know the exact spelling for a term or someone’s name.   Let’s say you were searching for issues that address the ExtraView Integration Daemon, but you mistakenly thought it was spelled “demon”.  A fuzzy search would return the proper “daemon” results anyways.

ExtraView’s fuzzy searches are based on the Levenshtein Distance, or Edit Distance algorithm (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance) . To do a fuzzy search use the tilde ~ symbol at the end of a single word term. For example to search for a term similar in spelling to demon use the fuzzy search:

#demon~

Note the use of the # at the beginning of the search term.

You can expand or narrow your search results by passing in an optional parameter after the ~ (e.g. #demon~0.8).  Using this optional parameter could help you filter out words such as “demo”.  The optional parameter values can be between 0 and 1, where a value closer to 1 returns terms with a higher similarity.  The default value if the parameter is not given is 0.5.

Click here to learn more about advanced searching techniques.

I welcome your comments here.