I have two datafiles. One of the files contains only one column with the name of the company (usually a hospital) and the other one contains a list of companies with the respective adresses. The problem is that the company names do not exactly match. How can i match them approximately ?
> dput(head(HOSPITALS[130:140,], 10))
I would like to obtain one datafile, where the company is matchen with an adress, if available in adress
Check out the fuzzyjoin package and the stringdist_join functions.
Here's a starting point. In your example data ignore_case = TRUE solves the matching problem. Depending on how the full data looks, you will have to experiment with the arguments (e.g. max_dist) and possibly filter the result until your achieve what you want.
library(dplyr)
library(fuzzyjoin)
HOSPITALS %>%
stringdist_left_join(GH_MY,
by = c("hospital" = "hospital_name"),
ignore_case = TRUE,
max_dist = 2,
distance_col = "dist")
Result:
# A tibble: 10 x 6
hospital hospital_name adress district town dist
<chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <dbl>
1 HOSPITAL PAPAR Hospital Papar Peti Surat No. 6, Papar Sabah 0
2 HOSPITAL PARIT BUNT~ Hospital Parit ~ Jalan Sempadan Parit Bun~ Perak 0
3 HOSPITAL PEKAN Hospital Pekan 26600 Pekan Pekan Pahang 0
4 HOSPITAL PENAWAR SD~ NA NA NA NA NA
5 HOSPITAL PORT DICKS~ Hospital Port D~ KM 11, Jalan Pantai Port Dick~ Negeri ~ 0
6 HOSPITAL PULAU PINA~ Hospital Pulau ~ Jalan Residensi Pulau Pin~ Pulau P~ 0
7 HOSPITAL PUSRAWI SD~ NA NA NA NA NA
8 HOSPITAL PUSRAWI SM~ NA NA NA NA NA
9 HOSPITAL PUTRAJAYA Hospital Putraj~ Pusat Pentadbiran Ker~ Putrajaya WP Putr~ 0
10 HOSPITAL QUEEN ELIZ~ NA NA NA NA NA
