stringdist

0.9.17

Approximate String Matching, Fuzzy Text Search, and String Distance Functions

126packages depend

835.5Kdownloads / year

90.0%test coverage

13/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Mark van der LooFirst published 2013-02-0739 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Implements an approximate string matching version of R's native 'match' function. Also offers fuzzy text search based on various string distance measures. Can calculate various string distances based on edits (Damerau-Levenshtein, Hamming, Levenshtein, optimal sting alignment), qgrams (q- gram, cosine, jaccard distance) or heuristic metrics (Jaro, Jaro-Winkler). An implementation of soundex is provided as well. Distances can be computed between character vectors while taking proper care of encoding or between integer vectors representing generic sequences. This package is built for speed and runs in parallel by using 'openMP'. An API for C or C++ is exposed as well. Reference: MPJ van der Loo (2014) doi:10.32614/RJ-2014-011.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("stringdist", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("markvanderloo/stringdist")

Development version from markvanderloo/stringdist. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-stringdist

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-stringdist

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-stringdist

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 2.0 min · r-oldrel-macos-x86_64

Code health

Yes

Tests · ratio 0.00

90.0%

Coverage · measured lines

100%

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-06-09
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
NOTE2026-06-08
12 OK · 1 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMEYes · 319 wordsVignettesYes · dynamicpkgdown siteNoNEWSYes · 100% structuredCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 100%
Documented parameters: 84%
Return-value docs: 100%
References docs: 19%

Downloads

835.5K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #444 · ~2.3K/day · ~69.6K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

53.5K30 days

193.7K90 days

835.5K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on4.8K r2u190 autocran28.8K conda_forge641 c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ markvanderloo/stringdist

342Stars

36Forks

24Open issues

0Open PRs

0Releases

631Commits

9Contributors

631 commits · Last activity 2026-01-16

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

1 development-tooling and community-health practice detected across 1 family in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/markvanderloo/stringdist on 2026-07-19.

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

Makefile

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

1 external dependency (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (1)

R >= 2.15.3

Imports (1)

parallel

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (1)

tinytest

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

126direct

51indirect

and 79 more packages.

Code & Tests

Code Composition

C 2,656 (46%)R 1,657 (29%)Rd 1,413 (25%)Vignettes 24 (0%)

Code characteristics

Cyclomatic complexity: 2.0 median / 15 max
Test cases: 447 / 0.00 per code line

Test coverage

Line coverage

90%

Expression

88.6%

Tests / Examples

90.0% / 76% ex

Functions

93 19 exported

Complexity

3.7 avg / 15 max

Call network

93 nodes / 125 edges

Call graph

Open call graph →

Loading call graph…

Lowest coverage

93 functions

Function	Cyclo	Coverage
ain exp	1	0%
.onLoad	7	0%
lengths.list	1	0%
setnames	2	57%
ensure_int_list	4	80%
qgrams exp	8	88%

People & History

People (7)

Maintainer (1)

Mark van der Loo

Author, Maintainer

Authors (1)

Mark van der Loo

Author, Maintainer

Contributors (6)

R Core Team

Contributor · added in 0.9.0

Johannes Gruber

Contributor · added in 0.9.6

Nick Logan

Contributor · added in 0.9.0

Chris Muir

Contributor · added in 0.9.5.0

Brian Ripley

Contributor · added in 0.9.8

Jan van der Laan

Contributor · added in 0.8.0

Package Timeline

39 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.9.17Latest
2026-01-16 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
0.9.15
2025-01-10 · diff ↗
0.9.14
2024-12-10 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
0.9.12
2023-11-28 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
0.9.10
2022-11-07 · diff ↗
0.9.9
2022-10-20 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
0.9.8
2021-09-09 · diff ↗
0.9.7
2021-07-28 · diff ↗
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
0.9.6.3
2020-10-09 · diff ↗
0.9.6
2020-07-16 · diff ↗

Show 38 earlier events

R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
0.9.5.5
2019-10-21 · diff ↗
0.9.5.3
2019-10-11 · diff ↗
0.9.5.2
2019-06-06 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.9.5.1
2018-06-08 · diff ↗
0.9.5.0
2018-06-07 · diff ↗
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
0.9.4.7
2018-03-13 · diff ↗
0.9.4.6
2017-07-31 · diff ↗
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2017-07-28 · diff ↗
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
0.9.4.4
2016-12-16 · diff ↗
0.9.4.2
2016-09-09 · diff ↗
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R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
0.9.4.1
2016-01-02 · diff ↗
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0.9.3
2015-08-21 · diff ↗
0.9.2
2015-06-24 · diff ↗
0.9.1
2015-06-22 · diff ↗
R
R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16
0.9.0
2015-01-10 · diff ↗
0.8.2
2014-12-16 · diff ↗
0.8.1
2014-10-07 · diff ↗
0.8.0
2014-08-08 · diff ↗
0.7.3
2014-05-16 · diff ↗
R
R 3.1.0 released · 2014-04-10
0.7.2
2014-03-02 · diff ↗
0.7.0
2013-09-06 · diff ↗
0.6.1
2013-08-09 · diff ↗
0.6.0
2013-07-19 · diff ↗
0.5.0
2013-06-21 · diff ↗
3.0.1
2013-04-28 · diff ↗
R
R 3.0.0 released · 2013-04-03
3.0.0
2013-04-02 · diff ↗
0.4-2
2013-02-11 · diff ↗
0.4-0
2013-02-07
R
R 2.15.0 released · 2012-03-30

Package metadata

First published: 2013-02-07
Total releases: 39 / 13 yrs
License: GPL-3 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 2.15.3
Download size: 843 KB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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