City name 'spell checker'

I want to provide a city name spelling checking and suggestion facility for a data entry application. I don't need the advanced linguistic analysis of natural language spell checkers, but I would like to provide a suggestion list of possible corrections.

I am leaning toward producing a suggestion list based on edit distance (AKA Levenshtein Metric). The edit distance is easy enough to compute but I haven't figured out how to efficiently access likely candidates to apply the criterion without a full table scan.

I am open to any suggestions, references, or other ideas. Thanks for your help.

Keith Morgan Received on Fri Dec 03 1999 - 09:38:42 CST