## org.apache.lucene.search.spell
Class NGramDistance

    java.lang.Object
      org.apache.lucene.search.spell.NGramDistance

All Implemented Interfaces:
  StringDistance

    public class NGramDistance

extends Object
implements StringDistance

N-Gram version of edit distance based on paper by Grzegorz Kondrak, "N-gram similarity and distance". Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE 2005), pp. 115-126, Buenos Aires, Argentina, November 2005. http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~kondrak/papers/spire05.pdf This implementation uses the position-based optimization to compute partial matches of n-gram sub-strings and adds a null-character prefix of size n-1 so that the first character is contained in the same number of n-grams as a middle character. Null-character prefix matches are discounted so that strings with no matching characters will return a distance of 0.

Constructor Summary
`NGramDistance()` Creates an N-Gram distance measure using n-grams of size 2.
`NGramDistance(int size)` Creates an N-Gram distance measure using n-grams of the specified size.

Method Summary
`float` `getDistance(String source, String target)` Returns a float between 0 and 1 based on how similar the specified strings are to one another.

Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object
`clone, equals, finalize, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, toString, wait, wait, wait`

Constructor Detail

### NGramDistance

    public NGramDistance(int size)

  Creates an N-Gram distance measure using n-grams of the specified size.

  Parameters:
    `size` - The size of the n-gram to be used to compute the string distance.

### NGramDistance

    public NGramDistance()

  Creates an N-Gram distance measure using n-grams of size 2.

Method Detail

### getDistance

    public float getDistance(String source,
                             String target)

  Description copied from interface: `StringDistance`
  Returns a float between 0 and 1 based on how similar the specified strings are to one another. Returning a value of 1 means the specified strings are identical and 0 means the string are maximally different.

  Specified by:
    `getDistance` in interface `StringDistance`
  Parameters:
    `source` - The first string.
    `target` - The second string.
  Returns:
    a float between 0 and 1 based on how similar the specified strings are to one another.