In information theory and computer science, the edit distance between two strings of characters is the number of operations required to transform one of them into the other. There are several different algorithms to define or calculate this metric: Not to be confused with information technology, information science, or informatics. ... Computer science, or computing science, is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. ... In computer programming and formal language theory, (and other branches of mathematics), a string is an ordered sequence of symbols. ...
In information theory, the Hamming distance between two strings of equal length is the number of positions for which the corresponding symbols are different. ... In information theory and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a string metric which is one way to measure edit distance. ... Damerau-Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring edit distance in information theory and computer science. ... The Jaro-Winkler distance (Winkler, 1999) is a measure of similarity between two strings. ...
Fuzzy string searching is the name for a category of techniques for finding one or more substrings of a text that approximately match some given pattern string. ...
In information theory, the Levenshtein distance or editdistance between two strings is given by the minimum number of operations needed to transform one string into the other, where an operation is an insertion, deletion, or substitution.
It can be considered a generalization of the Hamming distance, which is used for strings of the same length and only considers substitution edits.
The Levenshtein distance has several simple upper and lower bounds that are useful in applications which compute many of them and compare them.