Fantastically thorough research, the kind of stuff I love to read. However I can't help but feel the much less impressive other answer "Use Levenshtein distance, here is the link." (paraphrased) is the better answer.

The long-winded answer goes in to a huge amount of details on really interesting pattern matching problems... but not really the specific problem mentioned by the question asker.

I'm glad for a world with Stack Overflow and other similar resources, because I find the long answer fascinating but if I were asking the question I'd much prefer also having access to the shorter, succinct, and also-correct answer beneath it.