What are some algorithms for comparing how similar two strings are?

Question

I need to compare strings to decide whether they represent the same thing. This relates to case titles entered by humans where abbreviations and other small details may di

Answer 1

Damerau Levenshtein distance is another algorithm for comparing two strings and it is similar to the Levenshtein distance algorithm. The difference between the two is that it can also check transpositions between characters and hence may give a better result for error correction.

For example: The Levenshtein distance between night and nigth is 2 but Damerau Levenshtein distance between night and nigth will be 1 because it is just a swap of a pair of characters.