[R] regexpr - ignore all special characters and punctuation in a string

[Marc Schwartz]

> On Apr 20, 2015, at 8:59 AM, Dimitri Liakhovitski <dimitri.liakhovitski at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello!
> 
> Please point me in the right direction.
> I need to match 2 strings, but focusing ONLY on characters, ignoring
> all special characters and punctuation signs, including (), "", etc..
> 
> For example:
> I want the following to return: TRUE
> 
> "What a nice day today! - Story of happiness: Part 2." ==
>   "What a nice day today: Story of happiness (Part 2)"
> 
> 
> -- 
> Thank you!
> Dimitri Liakhovitski


Look at ?agrep:

Vec1 <- "What a nice day today! - Story of happiness: Part 2."
Vec2 <- "What a nice day today: Story of happiness (Part 2)”

# Match the words, not the punctuation.
# Not fully tested

> agrep("What a nice day today Story of happiness Part 2", c(Vec1, Vec2))
[1] 1 2

> agrep("What a nice day today Story of happiness Part 2", c(Vec1, Vec2), 
        value = TRUE)
[1] "What a nice day today! - Story of happiness: Part 2."
[2] "What a nice day today: Story of happiness (Part 2)”  


Also, possibly:

  http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/stringdist


Regards,

Marc Schwartz