Levenshtein distance
The most widely known string metric is a rudimentary one called the Levenshtein distance (also known as edit distance). It operates between two input strings, returning a number equivalent to the number of substitutions and deletions needed in order to transform one input string into another. Simplistic string metrics such as Levenshtein distance have expanded to include phonetic, token, grammatical and character-based methods of statistical comparisons.