Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Michael Davidsaver via Core-talk <core-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Fri, 5 Feb 2021 09:07:54 -0800

On 2/4/21 10:52 AM, Michael Davidsaver wrote:
> On 2/3/21 5:23 PM, Michael Davidsaver wrote:
> ...
>> How about improving the error message by printing the choices list from
>> dbPutString() in a way which invites copy+paste?
>>
>>> Can't set "foo.SCAN" to "10 seconds" Extraneous characters
>>> Error at or before ")" in path "."  file "badchoice.db" line 2
>>> dbLoadRecords: failed to load 'badchoice.db'
>>> Error: Failed to load: badchoice.db
>> might become
> Ok, this is the best I have time for today.  Not perfect, as you can see
> it gets my "Pensive" wrong.  Maybe someone knows a better similarity algorithm?
> 
> https://github.com/epics-base/epics-base/pull/104

After investigation a little more.  aka. reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_distance
I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance which seems to work much better.

Now I think the "Did you mean" suggestions should be reasonably useful, while only adding one
line of output.

Does this seem like a reasonable compromise in terms of SNR?

> Can't set "bar.DTYP" to "Soft Chanel" Not devsup for ai : No digits to convert
>     Did you mean "Soft Channel"?

> Can't set "baz.IVOA" to "Set output To IVOV" using menuIvoa.dbd : No digits to convert
>     Did you mean "Set output to IVOV"?

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System