It’s a fact — people make typos or simply use alternate spellings on a frequent basis.

Whatever the cause, from a practical point of view, different variants of similar strings can pose challenges for software developers. Your application needs to be capable of handling these inevitable edge-cases.

Take names, for example. I go by Peter in some places, Pete in others. Amongst other variants, my name can be represented by:

• “Pete Gleeson”
• “Peter J Gleeson”
• “Mr P Gleeson”
• “Gleeson, Peter”

And that’s not to mention alternative spellings of my surname, such as “Gleason”. All these different variations for just one string — matching them against each other programmatically might not seem obvious. …