Stores a EditDistance implementation and a CharSequence "left" string. The apply(CharSequence right) method accepts the "right" string and invokes the comparison function for the pair of strings.

The following is an example which finds the most similar string:

EditDistance<Integer> editDistance = new LevenshteinDistance();
String target = "Apache";
EditDistanceFrom<Integer> editDistanceFrom =
    new EditDistanceFrom<Integer>(editDistance, target);
String mostSimilar = null;
Integer shortestDistance = null;

for (String test : new String[] { "Appaloosa", "a patchy", "apple" }) {
    Integer distance = editDistanceFrom.apply(test);
    if (shortestDistance == null || distance < shortestDistance) {
        shortestDistance = distance;
        mostSimilar = test;
    }
}

System.out.println("The string most similar to \"" + target + "\" "
    + "is \"" + mostSimilar + "\" because "
    + "its distance is only " + shortestDistance + ".");