Statistics, Department of
The R Journal
Date of this Version
6-2014
Document Type
Article
Citation
The R Journal (June 2014) 6(1); Editor: Deepayan Sarkar
Abstract
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%.
Included in
Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Commons, Programming Languages and Compilers Commons
Comments
Copyright 2014, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported