Cologne Phonetic Name Coding

The Cologne phonetic name coding procedure.

Usage

cologne(word, maxCodeLen = NULL, clean = TRUE)

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

Value

the Cologne encoded character vector

Details

maxCodeLen = NULL preserves the algorithm's historical unbounded output. An explicit nonnegative whole-number value truncates each code to at most that many characters.

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

References

James P. Howard, II, "Phonetic Spelling Algorithm Implementations for R," Journal of Statistical Software, vol. 95, no. 8, (2020), p. 1–21, <10.18637/jss.v095.i08>.

Hans Joachim Postel. "Die Koelner Phonetik. Ein Verfahren zur Identifizierung von Personennamen auf der Grundlage der Gestaltanalyse." IBM-Nachrichten 19. Jahrgang, 1969, p. 925-931.

See also

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

Examples

cologne("William")
#> [1] "356"
cologne(c("Peter", "Peady"))
#> [1] "127" "12" 
cologne("Stevenson", maxCodeLen = 8)
#> [1] "823686"