String Similarity: Levenshtein, Jaro and Jaro–Winkler

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 20:00:00 +0000

Two strings are equal or they are not, and for a computer that is the end of it: "Smith" and "Smyth" differ, and so do "recieve" and "receive". For the person who typed them, though, they are almost the same, and a lot of software has to act on that “almost”. A spell checker has to find the word that was meant. A search box has to forgive a typo. A company merging two customer lists has to notice that “Jon Smyth, 12 Main St” and “John Smith, 12 Main Street” are probably the same person. A string similarity measure puts a number on how close two strings are, so a program can make those calls.

What Are Data Structures? From Arrays to Hash Tables, and How to Choose One

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Niklaus Wirth titled a 1976 book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs,¹ and What Is Programming? quoted it: choosing how to represent information is as much a part of programming as choosing the steps that work on it. This article is about the second half of that equation. It explains what a data structure is, where the classic ones came from, how each works and what it costs, and how to choose between them. The examples were run with Python 3.10 on an Intel Core i9-13900K, and their output is shown exactly as printed.

Algorithms on Artur Rios Lab

String Similarity: Levenshtein, Jaro and Jaro–Winkler

What Are Data Structures? From Arrays to Hash Tables, and How to Choose One