Python Challenges: Compute the edit distance between two given strings

Last update on December 21 2024 07:49:46 (UTC/GMT +8 hours)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computational linguistics and computer science, edit distance is a way of quantifying how dissimilar two strings (e.g., words) are to one another by counting the minimum number of operations required to transform one string into the other. Edit distances find applications in natural language processing, where automatic spelling correction can determine candidate corrections for a misspelled word by selecting words from a dictionary that have a low distance to the word in question. In bioinformatics, it can be used to quantify the similarity of DNA sequences, which can be viewed as strings of the letters A, C, G and T.
This problem was asked by Google.
The edit distance between two strings refers to the minimum number of character insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to change one string to the other. For example, the edit distance between "kitten" and "sitting" is three: substitute the "k" for "s", substitute the "e" for "i", and append a "g".
Write a Python program to compute the edit distance between two given strings.

Sample Solution:

Python Code:

def edit_distance(string1, string2):
    """Ref: https://bit.ly/2Pf4a6Z"""

    if len(string1) > len(string2):
        difference = len(string1) - len(string2)
        string1[:difference]

    elif len(string2) > len(string1):
        difference = len(string2) - len(string1)
        string2[:difference]

    else:
        difference = 0

    for i in range(len(string1)):
        if string1[i] != string2[i]:
            difference += 1

    return difference

print(edit_distance("kitten", "sitting")) #3
print(edit_distance("medium", "median")) #2  

Sample Output:

3
2

Flowchart:

Python Code Editor:

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