pylev

Warnings

• deprecated In v1.1.0, a much faster Levenshtein variant was introduced and became the default `pylev.levenshtein()`. The older, naive implementation was renamed to `pylev.classic_levenschtein()`. While aliases for backward-compatibility were added in v1.2.0, relying on the older, slower method or its original name is deprecated and should be avoided in new code.
  Fix: Always use `pylev.levenshtein()` for the optimized algorithm. If you explicitly need the naive implementation, use `pylev.classic_levenschtein()`.
• deprecated In v1.2.0, all incorrect spellings of 'Levenshtein' in method names were corrected. While older, misspelled method names were aliased for backward-compatibility, new code should exclusively use the correctly spelled versions to prevent potential future breakage or confusion.
  Fix: Ensure all calls to pylev functions use the correct spelling 'levenshtein' (without a 'c').
• gotcha `pylev.levenshtein()` computes the character-level Levenshtein distance between strings. If you intend to calculate word-level distance between sentences or phrases, you must first pre-process the strings into lists of words (e.g., using `str.split()`). Passing raw sentences will treat each character as an individual item.
  Fix: For word-level distance, convert strings to lists of words: `pylev.levenshtein(sentence1.split(), sentence2.split())`.

Install

• pip install pylev Install pylev

Imports

• levenshtein

  import pylev
  distance = pylev.levenshtein('string1', 'string2')

Quickstart

Calculates the Levenshtein distance between two simple strings.

import pylev

str1 = 'kitten'
str2 = 'sitting'
distance = pylev.levenshtein(str1, str2)

print(f"Levenshtein distance between '{str1}' and '{str2}': {distance}")