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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.
In information theory, linguistics, and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. The Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions or substitutions) required to change one word into the other.
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)".
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.
Comparison of two revisions of an example file, based on their longest common subsequence (black) A longest common subsequence (LCS) is the longest subsequence common to all sequences in a set of sequences (often just two sequences).
In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Unlike edit distance notions used for other purposes, diff is line-oriented rather than character-oriented, but it is like Levenshtein distance in that it tries to determine the smallest set of deletions and insertions to create one file from the other.
Computing E(m, j) is very similar to computing the edit distance between two strings. In fact, we can use the Levenshtein distance computing algorithm for E ( m , j ), the only difference being that we must initialize the first row with zeros, and save the path of computation, that is, whether we used E ( i − 1, j ), E( i , j − 1) or E ( i ...