152 – Find similar words

You can use the function get_close_matches from the module difflib to find words that are similar to another given word, for example in the context of an auto-correct feature.

Suppose you’re trying to write a loop but misspell the keyword while:

>>> whille True:
  File "<python-input-7>", line 1
    whille True:
    ^^^^^^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax. Did you mean 'while'?

The suggestion of the (correct) keyword while is done with get_close_matches:

from difflib import get_close_matches
import keyword

print(
    get_close_matches("whille", keyword.kwlist)
)  # ['while']

The function get_close_matches also allows you to specify the maximum number of similar matches you want and the “similarity threshold” to be used.