[R] Tuning string matching

[Jonathan Baron]

Sorry for joining late, but I wanted to see if my search page
could help.  (I don't know which search archive you looked at.)
I entered
fuzzy string match*
and got a few things that look relevant, including the agrep
function.

As for the second part of the question, that seems to be a coding 
problem that is dependent on the current form of your data.
Write me off the list and I'll send you an R script I use for
similar things (making PayPal payments).

Jon

 Dear list,
 
 I spent about two hours searching on the message archive, with no
 avail.
 I have a list of people that have to pass an on-line test, but only a
 fraction
 of them do it. Moreover, as they input their names, the resulting
 string do not
 always match the names I have in my database.
 
 I would like to do two things:
 
 1. Match any strings that are 90% the same
 Example:
 name1 <- "Harry Harrington"
 name2 <- "Harry Harington"
 I need a function that would declare those strings as a match (ideally
 having an
 argument that would allow introducing 80% instead of 90%)

-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
R search page: http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/