Levenshtein distance(Edit distance)

In information theory, Linguistics and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. Informally, the Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions or substitutions) required to change one word into the other.
It is named after Vladimir Levenshtein, who considered this distance in 1965.
Levenshtein distance may also be referred to as edit distance, although that term may also denote a larger family of distance metrics.
It is closely related to pairwise string alignments.
Mathematically, the Levenshtein distance between two strings a,b (of length |a| and |b| respectively) is given by lev a,b (|a|,|b|) where

where l (ai!=bj) is the indicator function equal to 0 when ai=bj and equal to 1 otherwise, and lev a,b(i,j) is the distance between the first i characters of a and the first j characters of b.
Note that the first element in the minimum corresponds to deletion (from a to b), the second to insertion and the third to match or mismatch, depending on whether the respective symbols are the same.

Examples:
For example, the Levenshtein distance between “kitten” and “sitting” is 3, since the following three edits change one into the other, and there is no way to do it with fewer than three edits:
kitten → sitten (substitution of “s” for “k”)
sitten → sittin (substitution of “i” for “e”)
sittin → sitting (insertion of “g” at the end).

C实现：

//Recursive
// len_s and len_t are the number of characters in string s and t respectively
int LevenshteinDistance(const char *s, int len_s, const char *t, int len_t)
{ 
  int cost;

  /* base case: empty strings */
  if (len_s == 0) return len_t;
  if (len_t == 0) return len_s;

  /* test if last characters of the strings match */
  if (s[len_s-1] == t[len_t-1])
      cost = 0;
  else
      cost = 1;

  /* return minimum of delete char from s, delete char from t, and delete char from both */
  return minimum(LevenshteinDistance(s, len_s - 1, t, len_t    ) + 1,
                 LevenshteinDistance(s, len_s    , t, len_t - 1) + 1,
                 LevenshteinDistance(s, len_s - 1, t, len_t - 1) + cost);
}