Revision 1 of 1, by Wp on 6-14-2020. The page as it is now.

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.