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.