I discovered today that Moneygement won’t accept unicode characters when someone adds transactions by email because of the editdist module I used to check it. Since I don’t really need a fast function to do it (it’s all eight-letter words on average), I decided to write my own Python version of the function and am sharing it here if anyone needs it (because I haven’t found a Python implementation anywhere). It’s released under a BSD license with attribution, meaning that I’d like it if my name was mentioned where it is used :)

"""Find the Levenshtein distance between two strings."""
if len(first) > len(second):
    first, second = second, first
if len(second) == 0:
    return len(first)
first_length = len(first) + 1
second_length = len(second) + 1
distance_matrix = [[0] * second_length for x in range(first_length)]
for i in range(first_length):
   distance_matrix[i][0] = i
for j in range(second_length):
   distance_matrix[0][j]=j
for i in xrange(1, first_length):
    for j in range(1, second_length):
        deletion = distance_matrix[i-1][j] + 1
        insertion = distance_matrix[i][j-1] + 1
        substitution = distance_matrix[i-1][j-1]
        if first[i-1] != second[j-1]:
            substitution += 1
        distance_matrix[i][j] = min(insertion, deletion, substitution)
return distance_matrix[first_length-1][second_length-1]