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rstringlevenshtein-distance

Trying to find a way to use adist() for words instead of characters in R

I'd like for the adist function to work the same way it does for words as it does for characters. What I mean by this is I'd like a deletion/substitution/insertion to apply to a whole word instead of characters. For example, I want "Alert 12 went off at 3am" and "Alert 17 was heard at 3am" to have a Levenshtein Distance of 3 because there are three substitutions of words needed to get from one string to another. Thanks

Solution

  • I guess you can try the following code to count different words 

    library(vecsets)
d <- length(vsetdiff(unlist(strsplit(s1," ")),unlist(strsplit(s2," "))))

    such that

    > d
[1] 3

    DATa

    s1 <- "Alert 12 went off at 3am"
s2 <- "Alert 17 was heard at 3am"