How to fuzzy search for a specific person into a list of people (concatenated surname+lastname)

Question

I am trying to match an input (coming from a third-party software) like this:

PIPPO CANASTA PER FT 501 del 1/11/2016

against a list of people that can be modelized as an array of strings (coming from another software)

[
  ...
  "CANASTA              PIPPO"
  ...
]

How can I accomplish this using C# (.NET)?

Answer 1

You can split each string into an array of words and search the list for the most number of matching elements:

string[] arrayToSearch = new string[] {
    "OTHER STUFF",
    "CANASTA              PIPPO",
    "MORE STUFF"
};

string stringToFind = "PIPPO CANASTA PER  FT 501 del 1/11/2016";

string[] wordsToFind = stringToFind.Split(default(Char[]), StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

string bestMatch = arrayToSearch.OrderByDescending(
    s => s.Split(default(Char[]), StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
          .Intersect(wordsToFind, StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase)
          .Count()
).FirstOrDefault();

Console.WriteLine("Best match: " + bestMatch);
Console.ReadKey();