Trigram string searching

String searching and sorting is another one of my unexplainable favorite programming pasttimes. I was reading the interesting but tragically short article on the subject on wikipedia when I stumbled upon a special technique for fuzzy string searching known as Trigram string searching. What's that? Well, this is what the (entire) article had to say:

Trigram search is a powerful method of searching for text when the exact syntax or spelling of the target object is not precisely known. It finds objects which match the maximum number of three-character strings in the entered search terms, i.e. near matches. A threshold can be specified as a cutoff point, after which a result is no longer regarded as a match.

Bit short for such an important technique. This is the algorithm that manages to successfully turn up the search results for "Programming" when you spelled it "Porgraming".

The lack of a real implementation to go with the article irritated me. "That can't require very much coding, can it?"

Nope, It didn't!