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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.
String functions are used in computer programming languages to manipulate a string or query information about a string (some do both).. Most programming languages that have a string datatype will have some string functions although there may be other low-level ways within each language to handle strings directly.
Adding transpositions adds significant complexity. The difference between the two algorithms consists in that the optimal string alignment algorithm computes the number of edit operations needed to make the strings equal under the condition that no substring is edited more than once, whereas the second one presents no such restriction.
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.
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)".
The function hamming_distance(), implemented in Python 3, computes the Hamming distance between two strings (or other iterable objects) of equal length by creating a sequence of Boolean values indicating mismatches and matches between corresponding positions in the two inputs, then summing the sequence with True and False values, interpreted as ...
Python supports a wide variety of string operations. Strings in Python are immutable, so a string operation such as a substitution of characters, that in other programming languages might alter the string in place, returns a new string in Python. Performance considerations sometimes push for using special techniques in programs that modify ...