You can use the [:alnum:] regex class with gsub. str1 <- "What a nice day today! - Story of happiness: Part 2." str2 <- "What a nice day today: Story of happiness (Part 2)"
gsub("[^[:alnum:]]", "", str1) == gsub("[^[:alnum:]]", "", str2) [1] TRUE The same can be done with the stringr package if you really are partial to it. library(stringr) On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 9:10 AM, Sven E. Templer <sven.temp...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Dimitri, > > str_replace_all is not in the base libraries, you could use 'gsub' as well, > for example: > > a = "What a nice day today! - Story of happiness: Part 2." > b = "What a nice day today: Story of happiness (Part 2)" > sa = gsub("[^A-Za-z0-9]", "", a) > sb = gsub("[^A-Za-z0-9]", "", b) > a==b > # [1] FALSE > sa==sb > # [1] TRUE > > Take care of the extra space in a after the '-', so also replace spaces... > > Best, > Sven. > > On 20 April 2015 at 16:05, Dimitri Liakhovitski < > dimitri.liakhovit...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I think I found a partial answer: > > > > str_replace_all(x, "[[:punct:]]", " ") > > > > On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 9:59 AM, Dimitri Liakhovitski > > <dimitri.liakhovit...@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 > > > > > > > > -- > > Dimitri Liakhovitski > > > > ______________________________________________ > > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > > PLEASE do read the posting guide > > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.