fast-levenshtein - Levenshtein algorithm in Javascript
An efficient Javascript implementation of the Levenshtein algorithm with locale-specific collator support.
Features
- Works in node.js and in the browser.
- Better performance than other implementations by not needing to store the whole matrix (more info).
- Locale-sensitive string comparisons if needed.
- Comprehensive test suite and performance benchmark.
- Small: <1 KB minified and gzipped
Installation
node.js
Install using npm:
$ npm install fast-levenshtein
Browser
Using bower:
$ bower install fast-levenshtein
If you are not using any module loader system then the API will then be accessible via the window.Levenshtein object.
CDN
The latest version is now also always available at https://npm-cdn.com/pkg/fast-levenshtein/
Examples
Default usage
var levenshtein = require('fast-levenshtein');
var distance = levenshtein.get('back', 'book'); // 2
var distance = levenshtein.get('我愛你', '我叫你'); // 1
Locale-sensitive string comparisons
It supports using Intl.Collator for locale-sensitive string comparisons:
var levenshtein = require('fast-levenshtein');
levenshtein.get('mikailovitch', 'Mikhaïlovitch', { useCollator: true});
// 1
Building and Testing
To build the code and run the tests:
$ npm install -g grunt-cli
$ npm install
$ npm run build
Performance
Thanks to Titus Wormer for encouraging me to do this.
Benchmarked against other node.js levenshtein distance modules (on Macbook Air 2012, Core i7, 8GB RAM):
Running suite Implementation comparison [benchmark/speed.js]...
>> levenshtein-edit-distance x 234 ops/sec ±3.02% (73 runs sampled)
>> levenshtein-component x 422 ops/sec ±4.38% (83 runs sampled)
>> levenshtein-deltas x 283 ops/sec ±3.83% (78 runs sampled)
>> natural x 255 ops/sec ±0.76% (88 runs sampled)
>> levenshtein x 180 ops/sec ±3.55% (86 runs sampled)
>> fast-levenshtein x 1,792 ops/sec ±2.72% (95 runs sampled)
Benchmark done.
Fastest test is fast-levenshtein at 4.2x faster than levenshtein-component
You can run this benchmark yourself by doing:
$ npm install
$ npm run build
$ npm run benchmark
Contributing
If you wish to submit a pull request please update and/or create new tests for any changes you make and ensure the grunt build passes.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.
License
MIT - see LICENSE.md