Type “Helo World” into your Google search bar.
Google will ask you: “Did you mean: hello world”
A simple method to detect these
By studying this article, you’ll learn about the important practical algorithm to calculate the “Levenshtein distance” or “edit distance”.
The Basics
The Levenshtein distance is a metric to calculate the distance between two strings. It helps you to quantify how “similar” two strings are. The Levenshtein distance is also called “edit distance” which describes precisely what it measures: the number of character edits (insertions, removals, or substitutions) that are needed to transform one string into another. The intuition is the following: the smaller the Levenshtein distance, the more similar the strings.
The Levenshtein distance has important applications. Think about the auto-correction functionality on your smartphone. Say, you type in “helo” in your WhatsApp messenger. Your smartphone then selects several high probability words and sorts them (e.g. by Levenshtein distance). For example, the one with minimal Levenshtein distance (and, hence, maximal similarity) is the string “hello”. Thus, it may automatically correct “helo” to “hello”.
Let’s consider an example with two strings “cat” and “chello”. How to calculate the Levenshtein distance in this scenario?
We already know that the Levenshtein distance computes the minimal number of edits (insert, delete, or replace) to reach the second string starting from the first string.
Here is one minimal sequence:
- “cat”
- “
cht ” (replace “a” by “h”) - “
che ” (replace “t” by “e”) - “
chel ” (insert “l” at position 3) - “
chell ” (insert “l” at position 4) - “
chello ” (insert “o” at position 5)
In this way, we can transform the string “cat” in the string “chello” in five editing steps – the Levenshtein distance is 5.
The Code
Problem: Write a Python one-liner that calculates the Levenshtein distance of two strings a and b.
## The Data a = "cat" b = "chello" c = "chess" ## The One-Liner ls = lambda a, b: len(b) if not a else len(a) if not b \ else min(ls(a[1:], b[1:])+(a[0] != b[0]), ls(a[1:], b)+1, ls(a, b[1:])+1) ## The Result print(ls(a,b)) print(ls(a,c)) print(ls(b,c))
Listing: Calculating the Levenshtein distance of two strings in one line.
What’s the output of this code snippet?
How It Works
Before we dive into the code, let’s quickly explore an important Python trick we heavily exploit in the one-liner. In Python, every object has a truth value – while you are either good or bad in the world of Harry Potter, you are either True or False in the world of Python! Most objects are in fact True (normal people are usually good). Intuitively, you know the few objects that are False, don’t you?
- 0 is False
- ” is False
- [] is False
- {} is False
As a rule of thumb, Python objects are considered False if they are empty or zero. Equipped with this information, you can now easily understand the first part of the Levenshtein function:
We create a lambda function that returns the number of edits required to transform a string
Let’s say both strings are non-empty (otherwise the solution is trivial as shown previously). Now, we can simplify the problem in three ways.
First, we ignore the leading characters of both strings a and b and calculate the edit distance from a[1:] to b[1:] in a recursive manner. If the leading characters a[0] and b[0] are different, we have to fix it by replacing a[0] by b[0]. Hence, we increment the edit distance by one if they are different.
Second, we remove the first character a[0]. Now, we check the minimal edit distance recursively for this smaller problem. As we have removed a character, we increment the result by one.
Third, we (conceptually) insert the character b[0] to the beginning of the word a. Now, we can reduce this problem to the smaller problem that arises if we remove the first character of b. As we have performed one edit operation (inserting), we increment the result by one.
Finally, we simply take the minimum edit distance of all three results (replace the first character, remove the first character, insert the first character).
This one-liner solution demonstrates once again the importance of training your recursion skills – recursion may not come naturally to you but rest assured that it will after studying many recursive problems like this one.
Where to go from here?
This is an advanced algorithm that requires basic computer science and Python skills. If you feel like you need to train the basics, read the book “Coffee Break Python“. After studying the book, you will not only know your exact Python skill level, you will also understand Python code much faster!

While working as a researcher in distributed systems, Dr. Christian Mayer found his love for teaching computer science students.
To help students reach higher levels of Python success, he founded the programming education website Finxter.com. He’s author of the popular programming book Python One-Liners (NoStarch 2020), coauthor of the Coffee Break Python series of self-published books, computer science enthusiast, freelancer, and owner of one of the top 10 largest Python blogs worldwide.
His passions are writing, reading, and coding. But his greatest passion is to serve aspiring coders through Finxter and help them to boost their skills. You can join his free email academy here.