Takes a character vector and "simplifies" it by uppercasing, removing most non-alphabetic (or alphanumeric) characters, removing accents, forcing UTF-8 encoding, removing excess spaces, and optionally removing stop words. Useful in cases where you have two large vector of person or business names you need to compare, but where misspellings may be common.
simplify_string(
x,
alpha = TRUE,
digits = FALSE,
unaccent = TRUE,
utf8_only = TRUE,
case = "upper",
trim = TRUE,
stopwords = NA
)A character vector.
Should alphabetic characters be included in the cleaned up string? (Default: TRUE)
Should digits be included in the cleaned up string? (Default: FALSE)
Should characters be de-accented? (Default: TRUE)
Should characters be UTF-8 only? (Default: TRUE)
What casing should characters use? Can be one of 'upper', 'lower', 'sentence', 'title', or 'keep' for the existing casing (Default: 'upper')
Should strings be trimmed of excess spaces? (Default: TRUE)
An optional vector of stop words to be removed.
A character vector of simplified strings.
simplify_string(c('J. Jonah Jameson', 'j jonah jameson',
'j jonah 123 jameson', 'J Jónah Jameson...'))
#> [1] "J JONAH JAMESON" "J JONAH JAMESON" "J JONAH JAMESON" "J JONAH JAMESON"
simplify_string(c('123 Business Inc.', '123 business incorporated',
'123 ... Business ... Inc.'), digits = TRUE, stopwords = c('INC', 'INCORPORATED'))
#> [1] "123 BUSINESS" "123 BUSINESS" "123 BUSINESS"