Group together levels with similar names R

Question

I have a variable q with various levels. Some of the levels are actually the same but have been bad reported.

 length(q)
[1] 13490
> levels(q)
  [1] \"         


        

Answer 1

One solution could be to use grep and/or grepl:

x <- c("toto", "CERACETT","CERASETTE","Cerazette","CERAZETTE","CEVAZETTE", "youpi")
grep("ce[vr]a[z]ett[e]", x, ignore.case = TRUE, value = TRUE)
x[grepl("ce[vr]a[sz]ett[e]", x, ignore.case = TRUE)] <- "replacement_string"