Phonetic Spelling Algorithms in R

phonics provides phonetic encoders for English, German, and French names, plus the two-stage Match Rating Approach comparison. Every encoder accepts character vectors and preserves their length and order.

Installation

Install the released package from CRAN:

install.packages("phonics")

Load it and encode one or more names:

library(phonics)

soundex(c("Robert", "Rupert"))
caverphone(c("Peter", "Peady"), modified = TRUE)
phonics(c("Catherine", "Kathryn"), c("soundex", "nysiis", "metaphone"))

By default, an input containing characters outside an encoder’s supported alphabet produces a warning and an NA result. Set clean = FALSE to discard unsupported characters before encoding. maxCodeLen is a validated nonnegative whole-number bound where supported; Cologne uses unbounded output when maxCodeLen = NULL.

Algorithms included

Algorithm	Function and variants
Caverphone	`caverphone()` (Caverphone 1 and Caverphone 2)
Cologne Phonetic	`cologne()`
Lein	`lein()`
Match Rating Approach	`mra_encode()` and `mra_compare()`
Metaphone	`metaphone()`
NYSIIS	`nysiis()` (original and USDA modified)
Oxford Name Compression Algorithm	`onca()`
Phonex	`phonex()`
Roger Root	`rogerroot()`
Soundex	`soundex()` and `refinedSoundex()`
Census Modified Statistics Canada	`statcan()`

ONCA’s source describes an unpublished “anglicised” NYSIIS first stage. onca() therefore uses the documented standard NYSIIS rules; its modified NYSIIS and Refined Soundex combinations are explicit package extensions.

Runtime dependencies

The package imports Rcpp and data.table. Test, vignette, and documentation tools are development dependencies declared in DESCRIPTION.

Contribution guidelines

Use GitFlow.
Write unit tests using testthat.
Document functions using roxygen2.

For more information

Package reference
Howard, J. P., II (2020). “Phonetic Spelling Algorithm Implementations for R.” Journal of Statistical Software, 95(8), 1–21. doi:10.18637/jss.v095.i08

Acknowledgements

This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1548562. In particular, it used the Comet system at the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) through allocations TG-DBS170012 and TG-ASC150024.