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

Split your string:

> words <- strsplit(string, '\\s')[[1]]

Build a indices vector:

> indices <- 1:length(words)

Name indices:

> names(indices) <- words

Compute distance between words:

> abs(indices["help"] - indices["know"]) < 6
FALSE

EDIT In a function

 distance <- function(string, term1, term2) {
    words <- strsplit(string, "\\s")[[1]]
    indices <- 1:length(words)
    names(indices) <- words
    abs(indices[term1] - indices[term2])
 }

 distance(string, "help", "know") < 6

EDIT Plus

There is a great advantage in indexing words, once its done you can work on a lot of statistics on a text.