Clean and standardize words using R

Question

data<-data.frame(comment=c('scan','scanned','SCANNED','scan and sent','FAXED','faxed to','faxed- pt'))


1          scan
2       scanned
3       SCANNED
4 scan and sent
5         FAXED
6      faxed to
7     faxed- pt

I'm wondering how to use R to clean the data into:

1  scanned
2  scanned
3  scanned
4  scanned
5    faxed
6    faxed
7    faxed

Answer 1

You might want to checkout the stringdist package, e.g.:

library(stringdist)

toMatch <- c('scan', 'scanned', 'SCANNED', 'scan and sent', 'FAXED', 'faxed to', 'faxed- pt')
possibleValues <- c("scanned", "faxed")

possibleValues[amatch(x = toMatch, table = possibleValues, maxDist = Inf)]

Returns:

[1] "scanned" "scanned" "scanned" "scanned" "faxed"   "faxed"   "faxed"