Comparing Two Strings producing a numeric delta

Question

Does anyone know of a simple way to compare two strings together to generate the "amount of difference" between the two? (in a numeric value) I have been crawling google with little luck on this. And after doing some coding it's not as simple as I had thought. Any clues?

Answer 1

Are you talking about the "Edit Distance"? Do a search on "Levenshtein Distance", on SO or Google. I use the version posted on Stephen Toub's blog

Answer 2

You're looking for the Levenshtein distance.