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In information theory, the Hamming distance between two strings or vectors of equal length is the number of positions at which the corresponding symbols are different. In other words, it measures the minimum number of substitutions required to change one string into the other, or equivalently, the minimum number of errors that could have transformed one string into the other.
Number of UTF-16 code units: Java (string-length string) Scheme (length string) Common Lisp, ISLISP (count string) Clojure: String.length string: OCaml: size string: Standard ML: length string: Number of Unicode code points Haskell: string.length: Number of UTF-16 code units Objective-C (NSString * only) string.characters.count: Number of ...
The Levenshtein distance between two strings is no greater than the sum of their Levenshtein distances from a third string (triangle inequality). An example where the Levenshtein distance between two strings of the same length is strictly less than the Hamming distance is given by the pair "flaw" and "lawn".
Like raw strings, there can be any number of equals signs between the square brackets, provided both the opening and closing tags have a matching number of equals signs; this allows nesting as long as nested block comments/raw strings use a different number of equals signs than their enclosing comment: --[[comment --[=[ nested comment ...
Various algorithms exist that solve problems beside the computation of distance between a pair of strings, to solve related types of problems. Hirschberg's algorithm computes the optimal alignment of two strings, where optimality is defined as minimizing edit distance. Approximate string matching can be formulated in terms of edit distance.
COBOL uses the STRING statement to concatenate string variables. MATLAB and Octave use the syntax "[x y]" to concatenate x and y. Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET can also use the "+" sign but at the risk of ambiguity if a string representing a number and a number are together. Microsoft Excel allows both "&" and the function "=CONCATENATE(X,Y)".
Both character termination and length codes limit strings: For example, C character arrays that contain null (NUL) characters cannot be handled directly by C string library functions: Strings using a length code are limited to the maximum value of the length code. Both of these limitations can be overcome by clever programming.
The most widely known string metric is a rudimentary one called the Levenshtein distance (also known as edit distance). [2] It operates between two input strings, returning a number equivalent to the number of substitutions and deletions needed in order to transform one input string into another.