cached-levenshtein

cached-levenshtein is a package that provides a sometimes faster implementation of the Levenshtein distance algorithm by using caching. It is based on fastest-levenshtein, which is known for its impressive performance. If you need to find distances for a LOT of often repeated strings - this is your choice.

Installation

You can install cached-levenshtein via npm:

npm install cached-levenshtein

Usage

To use cached-levenshtein, you can simply import it and use the distance method:

1const { distance } = require('cached-levenshtein');
2
3const str1 = 'hello';
4const str2 = 'world';
5
6const result = distance(str1, str2);
7console.log(result); // Output: 4

Caching

This implementation of the Levenshtein distance algorithm uses caching to improve performance. If you have a lot of long strings to compare, this package can be more than 80 times faster than a regular Levenshtein distance implementation.

However, caching has an overhead, so if you know that your strings will always be different, using caching may be redundant.

Performance

The performance of cached-levenshtein is impressive, especially when compared to a regular Levenshtein distance implementation. Below is a chart that shows the performance difference between cached-levenshtein and a regular implementation for 1000 RANDOM strings. The more exact strings dataset contains, the better performance cached-based implementation will give.

string length	fastest-levenstein (op/sec)	cached-levenstein (op/sec)
4	40,121	7,856
8	20,671	7,927
16	10,605	6,862
32	4,872	6,142
64	1,008	3,983
128	328	2,636
256	98	1,762
512	22	993
1024	6	538

Acknowledgements

This package is based on fastest-levenshtein, which provides a fast implementation of the Levenshtein distance algorithm.