StringDistances allow to compute various distances between strings. It works with any string of type AbstractString (in particular ASCII and UTF-8)

Distances

• Hamming Distance
• Jaro Distance
• Levenshtein Distance
• Damerau-Levenshtein Distance
• QGram Distance
• Cosine Distance
• Jaccard Distance

Syntax

• The basic syntax follows the Distances package:

  using StringDistances
  evaluate(Hamming(), "martha", "marhta")
  evaluate(QGram(2), "martha", "marhta")
  

• Normalize a distance between 0-1 with Normalized

  evaluate(Normalized(Hamming()), "martha", "marhta")
  evaluate(Normalized(QGram(2)), "martha", "marhta")
  

• Add a Winkler adjustment with Winkler

  evaluate(Winkler(Jaro()), "martha", "marhta")
  evaluate(Winkler(Qgram(2)), "martha", "marhta")
  

  While the Winkler adjustment was originally defined in the context of the Jaro distance, it can be helpful with other distances too. Note: a distance is automatically normalized between 0 and 1 when used with a Winkler adjustment.

References

A good reference for these string distances is an article written for the R package stringdist: The stringdist Package for Approximate String Matching Mark P.J. van der Loo