linecode/python-levenshtein

The Levenshtein Python C extension module contains functions for fast computation of Levenshtein distance and string similarity

Contents

• Maintainer needed
• Introduction
• Documentation
• License
• History
• Source code
• Authors

Maintainer needed

I (Mikko Ohtamaa) am not currently maintaining this code. I just pulled in to Github for general good (was not available in public repo before). So if you file any issues I won't be looking into them.

Introduction

The Levenshtein Python C extension module contains functions for fast computation of

• Levenshtein (edit) distance, and edit operations
• string similarity
• approximate median strings, and generally string averaging
• string sequence and set similarity

It supports both normal and Unicode strings.

Python 2.2 or newer is required.

StringMatcher.py is an example SequenceMatcher-like class built on the top of Levenshtein. It misses some SequenceMatcher's functionality, and has some extra OTOH.

Levenshtein.c can be used as a pure C library, too. You only have to define NO_PYTHON preprocessor symbol (-DNO_PYTHON) when compiling it. The functionality is similar to that of the Python extension. No separate docs are provided yet, RTFS. But they are not interchangeable:

• C functions exported when compiling with -DNO_PYTHON (see Levenshtein.h) are not exported when compiling as a Python extension (and vice versa)
• Unicode character type used with -DNO_PYTHON is wchar_t, Python extension uses Py_UNICODE, they may be the same but don't count on it

Documentation

gendoc.sh generates HTML API documentation, you probably want a selfcontained instead of includable version, so run in ./gendoc.sh --selfcontained. It needs Levenshtein already installed and genextdoc.py.

License

Levenshtein can be copied and/or modified under the terms of GNU General Public License, see the file COPYING for full license text.

History

This package was long missing from PyPi and available as source checkout only. We needed to restore this package for Go Mobile for Plone and Pywurfl projects which depend on this.

The project is not under active development as far as the maintainer knows.

Source code

• http://github.com/miohtama/python-Levenshtein/tree/

Authors

• Maintainer: Mikko Ohtamaa - I am not actively doing anything for this, please feel free take over PyPi and Github administration
• David Necas (Yeti) <yeti at physics.muni.cz>