The EditDistance(s,t) command returns an integer measure of the distance between the two strings s and t.

The edit distance between two strings s and t, is defined to be the difference between the sum of their lengths and twice the length of the longest common subsequence of s and t. If strings s and t have respective lengths m and n, then the edit distance is defined to be . It is related to the Levenshtein metric, which is sometimes also called the edit distance.

For a different notion of the distance between two strings, see StringTools[HammingDistance] and StringTools[Levenshtein].