Problems with Levenshtein algorithm in Java

Question

I want to use the Levenshtein algorithm for the following task: if a user on my website searches for some value (he enters characters in a input), I want to instantly check for

Answer 1

You can use Apache Commons Lang3's StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance():

Find the Levenshtein distance between two Strings.

This is the number of changes needed to change one String into another, where each change is a single character modification (deletion, insertion or substitution).

The previous implementation of the Levenshtein distance algorithm was from http://www.merriampark.com/ld.htm

Chas Emerick has written an implementation in Java, which avoids an OutOfMemoryError which can occur when my Java implementation is used with very large strings.

This implementation of the Levenshtein distance algorithm is from http://www.merriampark.com/ldjava.htm

 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance(null, *)             = IllegalArgumentException
 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance(*, null)             = IllegalArgumentException
 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance("","")               = 0
 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance("","a")              = 1
 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance("aaapppp", "")       = 7
 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance("frog", "fog")       = 1
 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance("fly", "ant")        = 3
 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance("elephant", "hippo") = 7
 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance("hippo", "elephant") = 7
 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance("hippo", "zzzzzzzz") = 8
 StringUtils.getLevenshteinDistance("hello", "hallo")    = 1