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Calculating distance

In the video exercise, you saw how to use Damerau-Levenshtein distance to identify how similar two strings are. As a reminder, Damerau-Levenshtein distance is the minimum number of steps needed to get from String A to String B, using these operations:

  • Insertion of a new character.
  • Deletion of an existing character.
  • Substitution of an existing character.
  • Transposition of two existing consecutive characters.

What is the Damerau-Levenshtein distance between the words "puffin" and "muffins" and which operation(s) gets you there?

This exercise is part of the course

Cleaning Data in R

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