On 20/04/2015 9:59 AM, Dimitri Liakhovitski wrote:
> Hello!
>
> Please point me in the right direction.
> I need to match 2 strings, but focusing ONLY on characters, ignoring
> all special characters and punctuation signs, including (), "", etc..
>
> For example:
> I want the following to return: TRUE
>
> "What a nice day today! - Story of happiness: Part 2." ==
> "What a nice day today: Story of happiness (Part 2)"
>
>
I would transform both strings using gsub(), then compare.
e.g.
clean <- function(s)
gsub("[[:punct:][:blank:]]", "", s)
clean("What a nice day today! - Story of happiness: Part 2.") ==
clean("What a nice day today: Story of happiness (Part 2)")
This completely ignores spaces; you might want something more
sophisticated if you consider "today" and "to day" to be different, e.g.
clean <- function(s) {
s <- gsub("[[:punct:]]", "", s)
gsub("[[:blank:]]+", " ", s)
}
which converts multiple blanks into single spaces.
Duncan Murdoch
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