StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

PO
text
Body
copied!<p>I actually side with the person (Aaron F) who said that you might be interested in the Levenshtein distance problem (and cited <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasta" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a>). His answer seems to me to be the best so far.</p> <p>More specifically, Levenshtein distance (also called edit distance), does not measure strictly the character-by-character distance, but also allows you to perform insertions and deletions. The best algorithm for this distance measure can be computed in quadratic time (pretty slow if your strings are long), but the computational biologists have pretty good heuristics for this, that might be of interest to you on their own. Check out <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST" rel="nofollow noreferrer">BLAST</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasta" rel="nofollow noreferrer">FASTA</a>.</p> <p>In your problem, it seems that you are dealing with differences between strings of numbers, and you care about the numbers. If you give more information, I might be able to direct you to the right variant of BLAST/FASTA/etc for your purposes. In any case, you might consider adapting BLAST and FASTA for your needs. They're quite simple.</p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasta" rel="nofollow noreferrer">1</a>: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance</a>, <a href="http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/Levenshtein.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/Levenshtein.html</a></p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload