Oxford Name Compression Algorithm

Source: R/onca.R

The Oxford Name Compression Algorithm name coding procedure

onca(word, maxCodeLen = 4, clean = TRUE, modified = FALSE, refined = FALSE)

Arguments

word

string or vector of strings to encode
maxCodeLen

maximum length of the resulting encodings, in characters
clean

if TRUE, return NA for unknown alphabetical characters
modified

if TRUE, use the modified nysiis function
refined

if TRUE, use the refinedSoundex function

Value

the ONCA encoded character vector

Details

The variable word is the name to be encoded. The variable maxCodeLen is the limit on how long the returned name code should be. The default is 4.

The onca algorithm is only defined for inputs over the standard English alphabet, i.e., "A-Z.". Non-alphabetical characters are removed from the string in a locale-dependent fashion. This strips spaces, hyphens, and numbers. Other letters, such as "Ü," may be permissible in the current locale but are unknown to onca. For inputs outside of its known range, the output is undefined and NA is returned and a warning this thrown. If clean is FALSE, onca attempts to process the strings. The default is TRUE.

References

Gill, Leicester. "OX-LINK: the Oxford medical record linkage system." (1997).

James P. Howard, II, "Phonetic Spelling Algorithm Implementations for R," Journal of Statistical Software, vol. 25, no. 8, (2020), p. 1--21, <10.18637/jss.v095.i08>.

See also

Other phonics: caverphone(), cologne(), lein(), metaphone(), mra_encode(), nysiis(), phonex(), phonics(), rogerroot(), soundex(), statcan()

Examples

onca("William")
#> [1] "W450"
onca(c("Peter", "Peady"))
#> [1] "P360" "P300"
onca("Stevenson", maxCodeLen = 8)
#> [1] "S3152500"