Also known as Edit Distance, it is the number of transformations (deletions, insertions, or substitutions) required to transform a source string into the target one. For example, if the target term is “book” and the source is “back”, you will need to change the first “o” to “a” and the second “o” to “c”, which will give us a Levenshtein Distance of 2.Edit Distance is very easy to implement, and it is a popular challenge during code interviews
Additionally, some frameworks also support the Damerau-Levenshtein distance:
It is an extension to Levenshtein Distance, allowing one extra operation: Transposition of two adjacent characters:
Ex: TSAR to STAR
Damerau-Levenshtein distance = 1 (Switching S and T positions cost only one operation)
Levenshtein distance = 2 (Replace S by T and T by S)