Developmentastic

  1. Mimetic Poly-Alloy

    Mimetic Poly-Alloy: A Quicksilver-inspired JavaScript search that favors consecutive matching characters.

    Quicksilver is great to search using acronyms or shorthand. Where it’s not a good fit is matching a string against a list of keywords. Here’s when I realized I needed to take a different approach:

    >>> "this is a test".score("this")
0.9285714285714286
>>> "this is a test".score("test")
0.7821428571428569

    In my application, I don’t care where a match occurs; I only care about the length of the match and if the search matched the beginning of a word.

    Taking some obvious inspiration from Quicksilver, I took a naive approach and computed a score by raising 2 to the power of the number of matching characters and threw in an extra point if it matched the beginning of a word. In the previous example, both searches would score 32 (2(4+1)).

    Here are some examples from the test suite:

    var input = "this is a test";

// Really long match.
equals(input.score("this is a test"), 32768.0, "14-character match");

// Beginning of a word
equals(input.score("test"), 32.0,   "4-character match");
equals(input.score("thit"), 19.6,   "3-character and 1-character matches");
equals(input.score("tiat"), 13.756, "4 1-character matches");
equals(input.score("th"),   8.0,    "2-character match");
equals(input.score("ti"),   7.6,    "2 1-character matches");

// Middle of a word
equals(input.score("hi"), 4.0, "2-character match");
equals(input.score("he"), 3.8, "2 1-character matches");

    If this type of search makes sense for you, give it a shot and fork it. If this is a solved problem, yell at me for not doing enough research.