I’ve been playing around with Drapper for a while now, and I honestly have to say - its one of the coolest little web apps I’ve seen in a long time in terms of the “Wow I have so many bloody uses for that!!” factor! I have lost track of how many times I have had to preg_match() [arrgghh!] myself towards some nice output from a service which doesn’t have an API (read: Xbox Live Gamercards), and now, this simple service does most of the work for me:

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I’ve always wondered what would be the easiest way to have a vast spelling checker for small phases, for use if your site takes a user string, searches the database, but returns no results. At first I thought about algorithms to compare the words to results in the contents of the database, so I did I quick google search, and right there, on the top of google, was my answer!

Googles “Did you mean” feature not only finds the nearest result to what the user typed, but also the most common search phrase if the query was vague - just what you need, eh?

I guessed this has been done before by somebody, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I quickly threw together a PHP script to test it out…

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