SIMD-accelerated bitwise hamming distance Python module for hexidecimal strings
SIMD-accelerated bitwise hamming distance Python module for hexidecimal strings
What does it do?
This module performs a fast bitwise hamming distance of two hexadecimal strings.
This looks like:
DEADBEEF = 11011110101011011011111011101111
00000000 = 00000000000000000000000000000000
XOR = 11011110101011011011111011101111
Hamming = number of ones in DEADBEEF ^ 00000000 = 24
This essentially amounts to
>>> import gmpy
>>> gmpy.popcount(0xdeadbeef ^ 0x00000000)
24
except with Python strings, so
>>> import gmpy
>>> gmpy.popcount(int("deadbeef", 16) ^ int("00000000", 16))
24
A few assumptions are made and enforced:
- this is a valid hexadecimal string (i.e.,
[a-fA-F0-9]+) - the strings are the same length
- the strings do not begin with
"0x"
Why yet another Hamming distance library?
There are a lot of fantastic (python) libraries that offer methods to calculate various edit distances, including Hamming distances: Distance, textdistance, scipy, jellyfish, etc.
In this case, I needed a hamming