match-sorter

What is match-sorter?

The match-sorter npm package is a simple, expected, and deterministic best-match sorting of an array in JavaScript. It's used to filter and sort lists of strings or objects by best match against a given query.

What are match-sorter's main functionalities?

Simple string matching

This feature allows you to sort an array of strings by matching against a single query string. It returns the items that match the query, ordered by best match.

import matchSorter from 'match-sorter';
const fruits = ['apple', 'orange', 'grape', 'banana'];
const sortedFruits = matchSorter(fruits, 'ap');
// sortedFruits will be ['apple', 'grape']

Object array matching

This feature allows you to sort an array of objects by matching against a query string on specified object keys. It returns the objects that match the query, ordered by best match.

import matchSorter from 'match-sorter';
const items = [{name: 'apple'}, {name: 'orange'}, {name: 'grape'}, {name: 'banana'}];
const sortedItems = matchSorter(items, 'ap', {keys: ['name']});
// sortedItems will be [{name: 'apple'}, {name: 'grape'}]

Custom ranking strategies

This feature allows you to customize the ranking strategy used for sorting. You can specify the order of ranking methods to tailor the sorting to your needs.

import matchSorter, {rankings} from 'match-sorter';
const books = ['The Hobbit', 'Game of Thrones', 'Curious George'];
const sortedBooks = matchSorter(books, 'th', {rankings: [rankings.STARTS_WITH, rankings.EQUAL, rankings.CONTAINS]});
// sortedBooks will be ['The Hobbit', 'Game of Thrones']

Other packages similar to match-sorter

fuse.js

Fuse.js is a powerful, lightweight fuzzy-search library with a similar goal to match-sorter. It provides flexible searching with customizable search options, but it might be more complex to use for simple use cases compared to match-sorter.

fuzzy

Fuzzy is a JavaScript module for fuzzy string matching. It's useful for filtering large arrays of strings or objects by a search term. It's less feature-rich and has a simpler API than match-sorter, which might be preferable for basic use cases.

quick-score

Quick-score is a library for scoring and sorting string matches for autocomplete suggestions. It's optimized for speed and is a good alternative to match-sorter when performance is a critical factor.

README

match-sorter

Simple, expected, and deterministic best-match sorting of an array in JavaScript. Demo

The problem

1. You have a list of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of items
2. You want to filter and sort those items intelligently (maybe you have a filter input for the user)
3. You want simple, expected, and deterministic sorting of the items (no fancy math algorithm that fancily changes the sorting as they type)

This solution

This follows a simple and sensible (user friendly) algorithm that makes it easy for you to filter and sort a list of items based on given input. Items are ranked based on sensible criteria that result in a better user experience.

To explain the ranking system, I'll use countries as an example:

1. EQUALS: Equality trumps all. These will be first. (ex. France would match France)
2. STARTS WITH: If the item starts with the given value (ex. Sou would match South Korea or South Africa)
3. WORD STARTS WITH: If the item has multiple words, then if one of those words starts with the given value (ex. Repub would match Dominican Republic)
4. CONTAINS: If the item contains the given value (ex. ham would match Bahamas)
5. ACRONYM: If the item's acronym is the given value (ex. us would match United States)
6. SIMPLE MATCH: If the item has letters in the same order as the letters of the given value (ex. iw would match Zimbabwe, but not Kuwait because it must be in the same order).

This ranking seems to make sense in people's minds. At least it does in mine. Feedback welcome!

Installation

This module is distributed via npm which is bundled with node and should be installed as one of your project's dependencies:

npm install --save match-sorter

Usage

const matchSorter = require('match-sorter')
// ES6 imports work too
// Also available in global environment via `matchSorter` global
const list = ['hi', 'hey', 'hello', 'sup', 'yo']
matchSorter(list, 'h') // ['hi', 'hey', 'hello']
matchSorter(list, 'y') // ['yo', 'hey']
matchSorter(list, 'z') // []

// You can also pass an options object:
// **keys** (defaults to undefined and just uses the value itself as above)
const objList = [
  {name: 'Janice', color: 'Green'},
  {name: 'Fred', color: 'Orange'},
  {name: 'George', color: 'Blue'},
  {name: 'Jen', color: 'Red'},
]
matchSorter(objList, 'g', {keys: ['name', 'color']}) // [{name: 'George', color: 'Blue'}, {name: 'Janice', color: 'Green'}]
matchSorter(objList, 're', {keys: ['color', 'name']}) // [{name: 'Jen', color: 'Red'}, {name: 'Janice', color: 'Green'}, {name: 'Fred', color: 'Orange'}]

//this also works with **nested keys**
const nestedObjList = [
  {name: {first: 'Janice'}},
  {name: {first: 'Fred'}},
  {name: {first: 'George'}},
  {name: {first: 'Jen'}},
]
matchSorter(nestedObjList, 'j', {keys: ['name.first']}) // [{name: {first: 'Janice'}}, {name: {first: 'Jen'}}]

// **threshold** (defaults to MATCH)
const fruit = ['orange', 'apple', 'grape', 'banana']
matchSorter(fruit, 'ap', {threshold: matchSorter.rankings.NO_MATCH}) // ['apple', 'grape', 'orange', 'banana'] (returns all items, just sorted by best match)
const things = ['google', 'airbnb', 'apple', 'apply', 'app'],
matchSorter(things, 'app', {threshold: matchSorter.rankings.EQUAL}) // ['app'] (only items that are equal)
const otherThings = ['fiji apple', 'google', 'app', 'crabapple', 'apple', 'apply']
matchSorter(otherThings, 'app', {threshold: matchSorter.rankings.WORD_STARTS_WITH}) // ['app', 'apple', 'apply', 'fiji apple'] (everything that matches with "word starts with" or better)

/*
 * Available thresholds (from top to bottom) are:
 * - EQUAL
 * - STARTS_WITH
 * - WORD_STARTS_WITH
 * - CONTAINS
 * - ACRONYM
 * - MATCHES
 * - NO_MATCH
 */

In the examples above, we're using CommonJS. If you're using ES6 modules, then you can do:

import matchSorter, {rankings} from 'match-sorter'

Inspiration

Actually, most of this code was extracted from the very first library I ever wrote: genie!

Other Solutions

You might try Fuse.js. It uses advanced math fanciness to get the closest match. Unfortunately what's "closest" doesn't always really make sense. So I extracted this from genie.

Contributors

Thanks goes to these people (emoji key):

Kent C. Dodds 💻 📖 🚇 ⚠️	Conor Hastings 💻

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!

LICENSE

MIT