Comparing files is something developers do every once in a while. For example, comparing configuration files to see what is different in the other environment or compare programming files to see what has changed in the source code. Implementations of text comparison algorithms are therefore widespread and used in several fields. For instance, in blogs and content managements systems, one might need to know what was altered in an update of a text (in cms like systems) or a programmer in a team would like to see what changed in the source code (svn). Also a lot of (combined) search, spell checking, speech recognition and plagiarism detection software compare texts (strings) in a certain way. This article covers the Levenshtein distance algorithm and how to use it to indicate alterations to texts. Read the rest of this entry »