R: Tries to correct misspelling of character string

best_match {rccmisc}

R Documentation

Tries to correct misspelling of character string

Description

This function uses fuzzy string matching to replace one possibly misspeled (or in other way not fully correct) character string with a correct version of the same string.

Usage

best_match(x, key, no_match = NA, all = FALSE)

Arguments

`x`	is a character string (or a character vector) that should be matched to the `key`
`key`	is a vector containging the correct spellings of the character strings.
`no_match`	Output value if there is no match. Default is NA. The input is returned unchanged if not matched and no_match = NULL.
`all`	is a boolean indicator to specify what happens if there is more than one match. Default is `FALSE` resulting in a warning message and that only the first match is used. If `TRUE` the returned vector will no longer have the same length as `x`.

Value

The function returns a character vector of the same length as x if all = FALSE but with each element substituted to its best match in the key-vector. Strings that could not be matched are NA if (no_match = TRUE) or unchanged if no_match = FALSE. If all = TRUE, one input character string could result in more than one output character string. The output might therefore be longer than the input.

Examples

best_match(c("Hej_apa!", "erik", "babian"), c("hej apa", "hej bepa", "kungen", "Erik"))
best_match(c("Hej_apa", "erik", "babian"),
   c("hej apa", "hej bepa", "kungen", "Erik"), no_match = FALSE)