Count common words in two strings

Question

I have two strings:

a <- \"Roy lives in Japan and travels to Africa\"
b <- \"Roy travels Africa with this wife\"

I am looking to get

Answer 1

You can use strsplit and intersect from the base library:

> a <- "Roy lives in Japan and travels to Africa"
> b <- "Roy travels Africa with this wife"
> a_split <- unlist(strsplit(a, sep=" "))
> b_split <- unlist(strsplit(b, sep=" "))
> length(intersect(a_split, b_split))
[1] 3