R: I have to do Softmatch in String

Question

I have to do softmatch in one column of data frame with the given input string, like

col <- c(\"John Collingson\",\"J Collingson\",\"Dummy Name1\",\"Dummy         


        

Answer 1

It seems that agrep is the function you are looking for. It does Approximate String Matching (Fuzzy Matching). It returns the closest match to the input pattern according to some distance measure, i.e. the generalized Levenshtein edit distance. See ?agrep for more details.

agrep("J Collingson", col, value = TRUE)
[1] "John Collingson" "J Collingson"