abbrev

What is abbrev?

The abbrev npm package is used to create a list of unique abbreviations for a given set of strings. It is particularly useful when you need to generate a minimal set of distinct abbreviations for a list of words, ensuring that each word's abbreviation is unambiguous.

What are abbrev's main functionalities?

Generating abbreviations

This feature allows you to generate an object where the keys are all possible unique abbreviations and the values are the full strings that they map to. In the code sample, abbreviations for 'apple', 'ape', and 'april' are generated, resulting in an object with keys like 'a', 'ap', 'app', etc., each pointing to their respective full words.

const abbrev = require('abbrev');
const abbreviations = abbrev('apple', 'ape', 'april');
console.log(abbreviations);

Other packages similar to abbrev

fuzzyset.js

Fuzzyset.js is a package that provides fuzzy string matching. It can be used to find strings that approximate other strings but does not generate abbreviations. It is more complex and suitable for cases where you want to match user input against a list of strings and find the closest match.

string-similarity

This package is used to find how similar two strings are or to find the best match in an array of strings. Unlike abbrev, it does not create abbreviations but rather compares strings for similarity, which can be useful in search algorithms and typo correction.

README

abbrev-js

Just like ruby's Abbrev.

Usage:

var abbrev = require("abbrev");
abbrev("foo", "fool", "folding", "flop");

// returns:
{ fl: 'flop'
, flo: 'flop'
, flop: 'flop'
, fol: 'folding'
, fold: 'folding'
, foldi: 'folding'
, foldin: 'folding'
, folding: 'folding'
, foo: 'foo'
, fool: 'fool'
}

This is handy for command-line scripts, or other cases where you want to be able to accept shorthands.

Changelog

3.0.1 (2025-04-10)

Bug Fixes

• 1fcc7c9 #100 abbrev works with a single string input (#100) (@owlstronaut)

Chores

• 7d26b01 #99 bump @npmcli/template-oss from 4.23.3 to 4.24.3 (#99) (@dependabot[bot], @npm-cli-bot)