Find typo with Lucene

Question

I would like to use Lucene to index/search text. The text can contain mistyped words, names, etc. What is the most simple way of getting Lucene to find a document containing

"this is Licene" 

when user searches for

"Lucene"? 

This is only for a demo app, so we need the most simple solution.

Answer 1

Lucene's fuzzy queries and based on Levenshtein edit distance.

Use a fuzzy query in the QueryParser, with syntax like:

Lucene~0.5

Or create a FuzzyQuery, passing in the maximum number of edits, something like:

Query query = new FuzzyQuery(new Term("field", "lucene"), 1);

Note: FuzzyQuery, in Lucene 4.x, does not support greater edit distances than 2.