Getting distance between two words in R

Question

Say I have a line in a file:

string <- \"thanks so much for your help all along. i\'ll let you know when....\"

I want to return a value

Answer 1

This is essentially a very crude implementation of Crayon's answer as a basic function:

withinRange <- function(string, term1, term2, threshold = 6) {
  x <- strsplit(string, " ")[[1]]
  abs(grep(term1, x) - grep(term2, x)) <= threshold
}

withinRange(string, "help", "know")
# [1] TRUE

withinRange(string, "thanks", "know")
# [1] FALSE

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I would suggest getting a basic idea of the text tools available to you, and using them to write such a function. Note Tyler's comment: As implemented, this can match multiple terms ("you" would match "you" and "your") leading to funny results. You'll need to determine how you want to deal with these cases to have a more useful function.