cleanNames: Clean up string names.

In kamilien1/patentR: A Toolbox for Analyzing Patent Data

Description

Quick cleanup of characters in a string, typically assignee (company names) and the inventors.

If you have issues with this, you may need to convert to UTF-8 or ASCII. Use the iconv(thisVector, to="UTF-8") or to="ASCII" and it should fix the problem. See the examples for the code.

This function:

1. Removes values between spaces, such as (US)

2. Changes all names to lower case

Usage

cleanNames(rawNames, firstAssigneeOnly = TRUE, sep = ";",
  removeStopWords = TRUE, stopWords = patentr::assigneeStopWords)

Arguments

rawNames	The character vector you want to clean up
firstAssigneeOnly	A logical value, default set to TRUE, keeping only the first assignee if multiple exist.
sep	The separating character for multiple assignees, default set to semi-colon.
removeStopWords	Logical default TRUE, if want to remove common company stopwords found in the stopWords parameter.
stopWords	An optional character vector of words you want to remove. Default to assigneeStopWords.

Value

A character vector of cleaned up character names.

Examples

assigneeNames <- cleanNames(acars$assignee)
# get a feel for the less-messy data
head(sort(table(assigneeNames), decreasing = TRUE))

# for a messier example, note you need to convert to ASCII/UTF-8 to get rid of errors
# associated with tolower
rawGoogleData <- system.file("extdata", "google_autonomous_search.csv", package = "patentr")
rawGoogleData <- read.csv(rawGoogleData, stringsAsFactors = FALSE, skip = patentr::skipGoogle)
rawGoogleData <- data.frame(lapply(rawGoogleData, 
function(x){iconv(x, to = "ASCII")}), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
assigneeClean <- cleanNames(rawGoogleData$assignee)
head(sort(table(assigneeClean), decreasing = TRUE))

kamilien1/patentR documentation built on May 20, 2019, 7:19 a.m.