I posted this yesterday to r-help and Ben Bolker suggested reposting it
here...
Dickison, Daniel <ddickison <at> carnegielearning.com> writes:
>
> The documentation for agrep says it uses the Levenshtein edit distance,
> but it seems to get this wrong in certain cases when there is a
> combination of deletions and substitutions. For example:
>
> > agrep("abcd", "abcxyz", max.distance=1)
> [1] 1
>
> That should've been a no-match. The edit distance between those strings
> is 3 (1 substitution, 2 deletions), but agrep matches with max.distance
>>=
> 1.
>
> I didn't find anything in the bug database, so I was wondering if somehow
> I'm misinterpreting how agrep works. If not, should I file this in
> Bugzilla?
>
Could you re-post this on r-devel? It definitely sounds like
this is worth following up. Based on a little bit of playing around,
it's quite clear that I don't understand what's going on. The examples
show things like
agrep("lasy","lazy",max=list(sub=0))
which makes sense, but
agrep("lasy","lazybc",max=1)
agrep("lasy","lazybc",max=0.001)
agrep("lasy","layt",max=list(all=1))
and
agrep("x",c("x","xy","xyz","xyza"),max=list(insertions=2))
agrep("x",c("x","xy","xyz","xyza"),max=list(deletions=2))
agrep("x",c("x","xy","xyz","xyza"),max=list(all=2))
all give "1 2 3 4" ??
this makes it clear that I really don't understand what's going on
based on the documentation. I tried to trace into the C code
(which calls functions from the TRE regexp library) but that didn't
help much ...
Daniel Dickison
Research Programmer
ddicki...@carnegielearning.com
Toll Free: (888) 851-7094 x103
FAX: (412) 690-2444
Revolutionary Math Curricula. Revolutionary Results.
Carnegie Learning, Inc. | 437 Grant St. 20th Floor | Pittsburgh, PA 15219
www.carnegielearning.com
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