Comparing text strings in terms of distance functions is a common and fundamental task in many statistical text-processing applications. Thus far, string distance functionality has been somewhat scattered around R and its extension packages, leaving users with inconistent interfaces and encoding handling. The stringdist package was designed to offer a low-level interface to several popular string distance algorithms which have been re-implemented in C for this purpose. The package offers distances based on counting q-grams, edit-based distances, and some lesser known heuristic distance functions. Based on this functionality, the package also offers inexact matching equivalents of R’s native exact matching functions match and %in%.
kernlab, RecordLinkage, MiscPsycho, cba, Mkmisc, deducorrect, vwr, stringdist, textcat, TraMineR
OfficialStatistics, Cluster, NaturalLanguageProcessing, Graphics, MachineLearning, Multivariate, Optimization, Survival
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For attribution, please cite this work as
Loo, "The R Journal: The stringdist Package for Approximate String Matching", The R Journal, 2014
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2014-011,
author = {Loo, Mark P.J. van der},
title = {The R Journal: The stringdist Package for Approximate String Matching},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2014},
note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2014-011},
doi = {10.32614/RJ-2014-011},
volume = {6},
issue = {1},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {111-122}
}