The stringdist Package for Approximate String Matching

Comparing text strings in terms of distance functions is a common and fundamental task in many statistical text-processing applications.Thus far, string distance functionality has been somewhat scattered around R and its extension packages, leaving users with inconistent interfaces and encoding handling.The stringdist package was designed to offer a low-level interface to several popular string distance algorithms which have been re-implemented in C for this purpose.The package offers distances based on counting q-grams, edit-based distances, and some lesser known heuristic distance functions.Based on this functionality, the package also offers inexact matching equivalents of R’s native exact matching functions match and %in%.