We are given a list of pattern strings and a single input string. We need to find all possible close good enough matches of input string into list of pattern strings.

Examples:

Input : patterns = ['ape', 'apple', 
                  'peach', 'puppy'], 
          input = 'appel'
Output : ['apple', 'ape']

We can solve this problem in python quickly using in built function difflib.get_close_matches().

How does difflib.get_close_matches() function work in Python ?

difflib.get_close_matches(word, possibilities, n, cutoff) accepts four parameters in which n, cutoff are optional. word is a sequence for which close matches are desired, possibilities is a list of sequences against which to match word. Optional argument n (default 3) is the maximum number of close matches to return, n must be greater than 0. Optional argument cutoff (default 0.6) is a float in the range [0, 1]. Possibilities that don’t score at least that similar to word are ignored.
The best (no more than n) matches among the possibilities are returned in a list, sorted by similarity score, most similar first.

# Function to find all close matches of
# input string in given list of possible strings
from difflib import get_close_matches

def closeMatches(patterns, word):
	print(get_close_matches(word, patterns))

# Driver program
if __name__ == "__main__":
	word = 'appel'
	patterns = ['ape', 'apple', 'peach', 'puppy']
	closeMatches(patterns, word)

Output:

['apple', 'ape']