edit-distance

Calculate Levenshtein distance between two strings.

The Levenshtein edit distance is a measure for the similarity between two strings. It's helpful for spelling correction, fuzzy completion, type-ahead and similar use cases.

This implementation supports Unicode.

Installation

In Cargo.toml add

[dependencies]
edit-distance = "2.2.2"

Then re-run cargo build. That fetches the dependencies and builds the code.

Usage

extern crate edit_distance;

edit_distance("kitten", "sitting"); // => 3

Development

Test changes before comitting.

cargo clean
cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo build
cargo test

Release

• change Cargo.toml version
• change install instructions (version)
• update History section
• commit with version as comment
• tag with version, then:

cargo publish
git push
git push --tags

History

2025-10-03 2.2.2 Parameter AsRef instead of &str
2025-10-03 2.2.1 Fix README
2025-10-03 2.2.1 Use edition 2021, MSRV 1.56
2024-09-04 2.1.3 Update dev-dependency 2024-06-26 2.1.2 Fix formatting
2024-06-26 2.1.1 Replace CI badge, maintenance
2019-03-02 2.1.0 Optimize memory usage
2018-01-02 2.0.1 Update dev-dependencies
2017-07-02 2.0.0
2015-05-01 1.0.0 Release
2015-04-18 0.0.1 Initial upload

Contributing

Before sending a pull-request that goes beyond a bugfix, please open an issue to discuss. PRs without clear objective or separation of concerns aren't likely to be accepted.

Credits

Thanks to @skade for very helpful criticism of my first rust lib.

License

APL 2.0, see LICENSE file.