simplify_string: Simplifies strings for analysis

In upstartr: Utilities Powering the Globe and Mail's Data Journalism Template

Simplifies strings for analysis

Description

Takes a character vector and "simplifies" it by uppercasing, removing most non-alphabetic (or alphanumeric) characters, removing accents, forcing UTF-8 encoding, removing excess spaces, and optionally removing stop words. Useful in cases where you have two large vector of person or business names you need to compare, but where misspellings may be common.

Usage

simplify_string(
  x,
  alpha = TRUE,
  digits = FALSE,
  unaccent = TRUE,
  utf8_only = TRUE,
  case = "upper",
  trim = TRUE,
  stopwords = NA
)

Arguments

x	A character vector.
alpha	Should alphabetic characters be included in the cleaned up string? (Default: TRUE)
digits	Should digits be included in the cleaned up string? (Default: FALSE)
unaccent	Should characters be de-accented? (Default: TRUE)
utf8_only	Should characters be UTF-8 only? (Default: TRUE)
case	What casing should characters use? Can be one of 'upper', 'lower', 'sentence', 'title', or 'keep' for the existing casing (Default: 'upper')
trim	Should strings be trimmed of excess spaces? (Default: TRUE)
stopwords	An optional vector of stop words to be removed.

Value

A character vector of simplified strings.

Examples

simplify_string(c('J. Jonah Jameson', 'j jonah jameson',
  'j   jonah 123   jameson', 'J Jónah Jameson...'))
simplify_string(c('123 Business Inc.', '123 business incorporated',
  '123 ... Business ... Inc.'), digits = TRUE, stopwords = c('INC', 'INCORPORATED'))

upstartr documentation built on May 29, 2024, 9:08 a.m.