The Levenshtein Distance (LDist) function computes the Levenshtein distance between two text values. The Levenshtein distance (or edit distance) is the number of edits needed to transform one string into the other. An edit is an insertion, deletion, or substitution of a single character.
The Levenshtein distance is useful for fuzzy matching of sequences and strings. The LDist function is often used to resolve a user-entered value to a standard value. For example, when a enters "Jon Dow" when searching for "John Doe".
A typical application of the LDist function is genome sequencing.