levenshtein

levenshtein, function

def pure levenshtein(a: text, b: text): number

Returns the case-sensitive Levenshtein distance between its arguments.

That distance is defined as the smallest number of edits (to remove a character, to add a character, or to replace a character with another) needed to transform the first argument into the second argument. The distance is 0 if the two arguments are equal, and is always smaller than the length of the longest argument.

Example

table Words = with 
  [| as From, as To |]
  [| "kitten", "sitting" |]
  [| "Saturday", "Sunday" |]

show table "Distance" with 
  Words.From
  Words.To
  levenshtein(Words.From, Words.To)

This displays the following table:

Recipes and Best Practices

You can combine argmin and levenshtein to find the value closest to a given text.

read form with 
  query : text

read "Words.csv" as Words with 
  Word : text

show scalar "Closest word" with 
  argmin(levenshtein(Words.Word, query), Words.Word)