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Levenshtein distance

The Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. Informally, the Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (insertion, deletion, substitution) required to change one word into the other.

This works on both ASCII and UTF-8 encoding. This implementations use two-dimensional dynamic array to store the distances of prefixes of the words compared.

pascal

uses
  Classes, SysUtils, Math, LazUTF8;

function LevenshteinDistance(const s1 : string; s2 : string) : integer;
function LevenshteinDistanceText(const s1, s2: string): Integer;

implementation

{------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Name:    LevenshteinDistance
  Params: s1, s2 - UTF8 encoded strings
  Returns: Minimum number of single-character edits.
  Compare 2 UTF8 encoded strings, case sensitive.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------}

function LevenshteinDistance(const s1 : string; s2 : string) : integer;
var
  length1, length2, i, j ,
  value1, value2, value3 : integer;
  matrix : array of array of integer;
begin
  length1 := UTF8Length( s1 );
  length2 := UTF8Length( s2 );
  SetLength (matrix, length1 + 1, length2 + 1);
  for i := 0 to length1 do matrix [i, 0] := i;
  for j := 0 to length2 do matrix [0, j] := j;
  for i := 1 to length1 do
    for j := 1 to length2 do
      begin
        if UTF8Copy( s1, i, 1) = UTF8Copy( s2, j, 1 )
          then matrix[i,j] := matrix[i-1,j-1]
          else  begin
            value1 := matrix [i-1, j] + 1;
            value2 := matrix [i, j-1] + 1;
            value3 := matrix[i-1, j-1] + 1;
            matrix [i, j] := min( value1, min( value2, value3 ));
          end;
      end;
  result := matrix [length1, length2];
end;

{------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Name:    LevenshteinDistanceText
  Params: s1, s2 - UTF8 encoded strings
  Returns: Minimum number of single-character edits.
  Compare 2 UTF8 encoded strings, case insensitive.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------}
function LevenshteinDistanceText(const s1, s2: string): integer;
var
  s1lower, s2lower: string;
begin
  s1lower := UTF8LowerCase( s1 );
  s2lower := UTF8LowerCase( s2 );
  result := LevenshteinDistance( s1lower, s2lower );
end;

end.

From the Free Pascal wiki, page "Levenshtein distance", as it stood on 2020-06-14 after a change by Wp, out of the wiki's dump of 2024-05-26. Copyright stays with the author who wrote it, according to the old wiki's Licensing page. If you have concerns about this material, message the admin.

Revision 1, last changed by WikiArchive .

Edited on wiki.freepascal.org by 4 people, 2013–2020

From the official wiki's backup of 26 May 2024: who edited this page there, and when. Edits made there after that date were not recorded, and the earlier versions are not shown here; the main page says why.

WhenWhoWhat changed
DjzepiCreated page
BigChimpcategories
Jwdietrichcategorization
Djzepi
Wp

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