cleanNames: cleanNames
In kailin-lu/recordlinkR: recordlinkR

cleanNames is used to preprocess character columns for blocking and linking functions. Names can be standardized by converting all characters to lower case, splitting full name columns into individual parts such as 'first' and 'last', and punctuation can be removed. For blocking and linking on autoencoded name fields, it is recommended to split each part of the name such as first, middle, and last, into separate columns.

1 2	cleanNames(df, cols = ".", split.pattern = NULL, split.col.names = NULL, lower = TRUE, strip.punctuation = TRUE)

`df`	Dataframe
`cols`	Vector of variables to apply changes to. If 'all' then cols = '.'
`split.pattern`	Named list of character to split variables. Variables are list names and values are the character to be split on
`split.col.names`	Named list of new variable names. Variables are list names and values are vectors of new variable names. Maximum number of splits on each column is the length of values.
`lower`	if TRUE then all elements in df[cols] will be lower cased
`strip.punctuation`	if TRUE then all elements in df[cols] will be stripped of punctuation