Levenshtein Distance Calculator

The Levenshtein Distance Calculator is a utility class that calculates the Levenshtein distance between two strings. The Levenshtein distance is a measure of the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions or substitutions) required to change one word into the other.

Installation

To use this plugin

Using pnpm

pnpm add @designbycode/levenshtein

Using npm

npm install @designbycode/levenshtein

Using yarn

yarn add @designbycode/levenshtein

Usage

Importing the Class

To use the Levenshtein Distance Calculator, you need to import the Levenshtein class:

import { Levenshtein } from '@designbycode/levenshtein';

Calculating the Levenshtein Distance

To calculate the Levenshtein distance between two strings, call the calculate method and pass the two strings as arguments:

const distance = Levenshtein.calculate('hello', 'hallo');
console.log(distance); // Output: 1

The calculate method returns the Levenshtein distance between the two strings as a number.

Error Handling

If either of the input strings is not a string, the calculate method will throw a TypeError. You can catch this error using a try-catch block:

try {
  const distance = Levenshtein.calculate(123, 'hello');
} catch (error) {
  console.error(error); // Output: TypeError: Argument 1 passed to Levenshtein::calculate() must be of the type string
}

Example Use Cases

Measuring String Similarity

The Levenshtein distance can be used to measure the similarity between two strings. A lower distance indicates that the strings are more similar.

const string1 = 'kitten';
const string2 = 'sitting';
const distance = Levenshtein.calculate(string1, string2);
console.log(distance); // Output: 3

Fuzzy String Matching

The Levenshtein distance can be used to implement fuzzy string matching. For example, you can use it to find strings that are similar to a given query string.

const query = 'hello';
const strings = ['hallo', 'helloo', 'hellllo', 'goodbye'];
const distances = strings.map((string) => Levenshtein.calculate(query, string));
console.log(distances); // Output: [1, 1, 2, 6]

License

The Levenshtein Distance Calculator is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.