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.

String Similarity on Artur Rios Lab

String Similarity: Levenshtein, Jaro and Jaro–Winkler