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Levenshtein distance¤

Levenshtein distance. Returns a distance value between zero and the size of the string.

Characteristics¤

This distance measure is not normalized, i.e., all distances start at 0 (exact match) and increase the more different the values are.

Compares single values (as opposed to sequences of values). If multiple values are provided, all values are compared and the lowest distance is returned.

Examples¤

Notation: List of values are represented via square brackets. Example: [first, second] represents a list of two values “first” and “second”.

Returns 0 for equal strings:

  • Input values:

    • Source: [John]
    • Target: [John]

  • Returns: 0.0

Returns 1 for strings that differ by one edit operation:

  • Input values:

    • Source: [John]
    • Target: [Jxhn]

  • Returns: 1.0

Returns 3 for strings that differ by three edit operations:

  • Input values:

    • Source: [Saturday]
    • Target: [Sunday]

  • Returns: 3.0

Parameter¤

None

Advanced Parameter¤

Q-grams size¤

The size of the q-grams to be indexed. Setting this to zero will disable indexing.

  • ID: qGramsSize
  • Datatype: int
  • Default Value: 2

Min char¤

The minimum character that is used for indexing

  • ID: minChar
  • Datatype: char
  • Default Value: 0

Max char¤

The maximum character that is used for indexing

  • ID: maxChar
  • Datatype: char
  • Default Value: z
  • levenshtein — Raw edit counts are not directly comparable across strings of different lengths. The normalized Levenshtein distance plugin addresses this by dividing the edit count by the length of the longer string, making the result length-independent.

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