Hi Irving. That is a very interesting and kind of cool problem. Happily, Mike Brock who built MVEL, which is part of drools, embeded soundex into it. So you can do (and I just tried this): rule "Hello World" when c : Cheese( eval(type soundslike "foobar") ) then c.setPrice(42); end And it will match "Cheese" with a type of "fubar" as well. Using soundex standard. You could of course use a function to use some other library that you want, but this is built in. Note the use of "eval" inside the pattern to indicate it is an expression, not a field constraint. Hope that helps ! Michael. On 9/4/07, Irving Reid <irving(a)cfrq.net&gt; wrote: > > I have a use case where we'd like to match free text strings, with words > sometimes spelled incorrectly. Has anyone tried Drools with an approximate > string matcher ( > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching)? > > I know that I can use regular expressions to match some common spelling > errors, but it would be way cool to use an algorithm that doesn't need to > have all the possible errors programmed in beforehand. > > - irving - > > > > > _______________________________________________ > rules-users mailing list > rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org > https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users >