I have a `select` element containing different titles; as an example:

```
<select name="titles">
  <option value="1">Mr.</option>
  <option value="2">Mrs.</option>
  <option value="3">Ms.</option>
  <option value="4">Dr.</option>
  [..]
</select>

```

Then I have a string that contains a user-submitted title (originally written in a freeform textbox). My task is to make selected the `option` in the `select` that corresponds to that title.

However, it occurs to me that users are sometimes stupid.

The user-supplied string I search with could be "dr." or "Dr" or something like that. I need to match it with the most relevant one (i.e. "Dr." instead of "Mr.", both of them close to say, "dr.").

How would I go about this? I've only ever done approximate matching with MySQL's `LIKE` and PHP's `levenshtein()`, neither of which to my understanding are rather relevant in JS.

jQuery 1.7.1 is available. IE6 compatibility doesn't concern me.

Thank you in advance!