How can I compute a difference between two strings?

Question

I want to create a function in Delphi that computes different levels of two strings. If two strings are equal (ignoring case), then it should return 0, but if they are not e

Answer 1

What you want is known as the Levenshtein distance (the minimum number of edits to transform one string into the other, where an edit is either a character insertion, character deletion or character substitution). The wikipedia site has a pseudo code implementation.

Delphi implementation:

function LevenshteinDistance(String1 : String; String2 : String) : Integer;

var
  Length1, Length2      : Integer;
  WorkMatrix            : array of array of Integer;
  I, J                  : Integer;
  Cost                  : Integer;
  Val1, Val2, Val3      : Integer;

begin
String1 := TCharacter.ToUpper (String1);
String2 := TCharacter.ToUpper (String2);
Length1 := Length (String1);
Length2 := Length (String2);
SetLength (WorkMatrix, Length1+1, Length2+1);
for I := 0 to Length1 do
  WorkMatrix [I, 0] := I;
for J := 0 to Length2 do
  WorkMatrix [0, J] := J;
for I := 1 to Length1 do
  for J := 1 to Length2 do
    begin
    if (String1 [I] = String2 [J]) then
      Cost := 0
    else
      Cost := 1;
    Val1 := WorkMatrix [I-1, J] + 1;
    Val2 := WorkMatrix [I, J-1] + 1;
    Val3 := WorkMatrix[I-1, J-1] + Cost;
    if (Val1 < Val2) then
      if (Val1 < Val3) then
        WorkMatrix [I, J] := Val1
      else
        WorkMatrix [I, J] := Val3
    else
      if (Val2 < Val3) then
        WorkMatrix [I, J] := Val2
      else
        WorkMatrix [I, J] := Val3;
    end;
Result := WorkMatrix [Length1, Length2];
end;