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Counts the fewest insertions, deletions and substitutions that turn one string into the other.

public static int Distance(ReadOnlySpan<char> a, ReadOnlySpan<char> b, TextElement element = TextElement.Utf16Unit)
public static int Distance<T>(ReadOnlySpan<T> a, ReadOnlySpan<T> b) where T : IEquatable<T>

Parameters — a and b are the two strings to compare; a string converts implicitly, so nothing is allocated for them. element says what counts as one character: TextElement.Utf16Unit by default, the native and fastest choice, or TextElement.CodePoint to match Python outside the Basic Multilingual Plane.

Returns — int, the number of edits. Zero when the two are equal, and never negative.

Example — the textbook pair: two substitutions and one insertion.

using Lodestar.Text.Distances;

int d = Levenshtein.Distance("kitten", "sitting");   // => 3

Remarks — this is the ordinary answer to "how different are these two texts", and the right tool for typing mistakes and mis-keyed names. To compare sets of words rather than characters, Jaccard — in the Lodestar.Text.Similarity namespace, not this one — is the better fit; to weight a common prefix, JaroWinkler.

The trap is that the result is not bounded. Three edits are enormous between two six-letter words and negligible between two paragraphs, so a raw distance cannot be compared across pairs of different lengths — NormalizedSimilarity is what you want for a score in [0, 1].

Applies to — net10.0, netstandard2.0.

See also — Levenshtein.NormalizedSimilarity, Indel.Distance, DamerauLevenshtein.Distance, the Python equivalence table.