JAVA - Finding a similar word in String ArrayList

Question

I'm working for a school project. Purpose of the program looking for the "Same" and "similar" words via input. I don't know how to find similar words numbers or just words.

FOR EXAMPLE:

INPUT: Car

OUTPUT: FOUND: CAR SIMILAR WORDS: 3(or the Words like 'carhood').

 boolean cnt = false;
 while(!cnt){
 // Variables
 ArrayList<String> WordList = 
 new ArrayList<>(Arrays.asList("açık",...."zorunda"));
 String Word = "";
 int WordIndex = 0;
 int WordListSize = WordList.size();
 boolean result = false;
 System.out.print("Kelime Giriniz: ");
 String Input = new Scanner(System.in).nextLine();
 // Search Loop
 for (int i = 0; i < WordListSize; i++) {
 // Temporary variables
 Word = WordList.get(i);
 WordIndex = WordList.indexOf(Word);
 // If there is word in word list
 if(Word.equalsIgnoreCase(Input)) {
 System.out.println("Kelime bulundu.");
 System.out.println("Kelime : "+Word);
 System.out.println("Kayıt Numarası : "+WordIndex);
 // Comparison number
 System.out.println(WordIndex+" Kelime ile karşılaştırıldı.");
 result = true;
 break;
 }
 }
 if(!result) {
 System.out.print("Kelime tarandı:");
 System.out.println((WordList.size()));
 System.out.println("Kelime bulunamadı.");
 }
 System.out.println("--");
 System.out.println("Devam etmek ister misiniz ?");
 System.out.println("'1' Evet, '0' Hayır.");
 System.out.println("--");
 int answer = new Scanner(System.in).nextInt();
 if(answer ==0){
 System.out.println("Çıkış yapaılıyor..");
 cnt= true;
 }
 }

it is Turkish btw.

• lalo: What is the question/problem?
• Yunus Berk KAYNAK: i don't know how to find similliar words
• jwismar: "Similar" is not very precise. You need to figure out what it means to be "similar". Is it enough to use String.startsWith()? Or String.contains()? Those might be good places to start at least.
• A_C: try contains() method on String then.
• Yunus Berk KAYNAK: i want to find words like. "Input: Car", Shows "Car" and "Carhood","Carlight" etc. words that contains input word.

Answer 1

You can do so easily using java-8 :

// Assuming this is your list
List<String> myList = Arrays.asList("Carhood", "Carlight", "Tree", "Red", "Carrom");
// using a filter and then collecting 'similar words' to a list
List<String> collect = myList.stream()
 .filter(s -> s.contains("Car"))
 .collect(Collectors.toList());
// to print it out
collect.forEach(System.out::println);

Answer 2

Actually there are lots of algorithms to check string similarity. You can read about lots of them and chose the favorite one using this link: https://github.com/tdebatty/java-string-similarity

There also is a maven dependency:

<dependency>
 <groupId>info.debatty</groupId>
 <artifactId>java-string-similarity</artifactId>
 <version>RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

and a couple of usage examples there.

In short you should set some kind of similarity coefficient and based on that algorithm will decide if strings are similar enough or not based on metrics like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance