🎌 Anime Title Matcher

A blazing-fast, ultra-accurate Rust utility for matching anime metadata — including English, Romaji, Native, and alternative titles — against messy or ambiguous inputs.

Built for anime apps, scrapers, and libraries that demand precision and flexibility when identifying shows.

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🚀 Features

• 🧠 Multiple Matching Strategies – exact match, normalized match, fuzzy match, and year/episode tolerance.
• 🌍 Multilingual Support – English, Romaji, and Japanese title support out of the box.
• 🧬 Heuristics + Fuzziness – adaptive scoring ensures the most accurate result wins.
• 🧼 Normalization Magic – intelligent preprocessing cleans up bad formatting, version suffixes, and extra junk.
• 🦀 Blazing Fast – written in Rust for speed and safety.

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🧪 Why It Works So Well

The matcher follows a layered, fault-tolerant strategy:

1. Exact Match

   • Direct string equality on preferred title fields.
   • Ultra fast and precise when inputs are clean.

2. Normalized Title Match

   • Cleans up titles: lowercased, punctuation/season tags removed, simplified spacing.
   • Matches even when formats differ (e.g., "Attack on Titan S1" → "Attack on Titan").

3. Year/Episode Tolerance

   • Smart fuzzy logic around expected year and episode counts to differentiate between remakes, seasons, or reboots.

4. Fallback Fuzzy Matching

   • Uses string similarity scoring to rank candidates when nothing else hits.
   • Prioritizes semantically closer titles over raw score alone.

These steps cascade, ensuring high precision with minimal false positives 💡

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📦 Usage

let search = ExpectAnime::from_string_title("Attack on Titan", Some(2013), Some(25));
let result = find_best_match(&search, &anime_list, |anime| anime);

match result {
    Some(m) => println!("🎯 Found match: {:?}", m.title),
    None => println!("💔 No match found."),
}

You can inject a list of ExpectAnime objects using your preferred metadata source (Anilist, MAL, etc.).

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📚 Example: Matching "Bleach TYBW"

Input:

{ "title": "Bleach TYBW", "year": 2022, "episodes": 13 }

Matched:

{ 
  "english": "Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War",
  "romaji": "Bleach: Sennen Kessen-hen",
  "native": "BLEACH 千年血戦篇"
}

✔ Matched via userPreferred + normalized title ✔ Year and episode count used to disambiguate from other Bleach entries

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🧠 Extensible Design

The matcher is designed to be plug-and-play with any data model. Just provide a closure to map your data into the matcher’s ExpectAnime structure. Easy~ 💋

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🛡 Accuracy by Design

The engine is:

• 🩷 Strict where it matters (title/season boundaries)
• 💜 Flexible when needed (typos, aliases, subs/dubs)
• 💙 Tested across thousands of common edge cases (especially Anilist/MAL discrepancies)

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📄 Licensing & Porting

You are totally welcome to port or adapt this algorithm into another language like JavaScript, Python, Go, etc. I believe in open sharing! 💞

📝 Please give credit if you do — Drop a link back to my GitHub profile: https://github.com/shimizudev

Licensed under the MIT license.

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✨ Credits

Built with love, logic, and way too many anime nights under the stars~ 🌌