如何检查数据框的字符串列是否与另一个数据框的字符串列匹配？

Question

I'm intending to perform a left join of two data frames using a common character column (let's call this name column). Ideally, all the values in the name column of df1 would have a match with the name column of df2. However, I understand some values may not match exactly but would have a partial match due to some spelling or punctuation error. For eg. "John Ezekiel" could be spelled as "John Ezekial" in the df1. I want to ensure that each value of the name column in df1 will have a match with some value in the name column of df2. In most cases, there would be an exact match but in the cases where there are not exact matches, I also want to replace those values of df1 with values of df2 that has most partial match. I've illustrated this problem by reproducing

df1 <- data.frame(name=c("John Ezekial","Mary Elizabeth","Fabio Fonini","Gael Monfils","Lucas Pouile"))    
df2 <- data.frame(name=c("Aron Ramsey","John Doe","John Ezekiel","Mary Elizabeth","Fabio Fognini","Gael Monfils","Marin Cilic","Lucas Pouille","Tomas Berdych","Juan Martin Del Potro"),id=1:10)
> df1
            name
1   John Ezekial
2 Mary Elizabeth
3   Fabio Fonini
4   Gael Monfils
5   Lucas Pouile

> df2
                name     id
1            Aron Ramsey  1
2               John Doe  2
3           John Ezekiel  3
4         Mary Elizabeth  4
5          Fabio Fognini  5
6           Gael Monfils  6
7            Marin Cilic  7
8          Lucas Pouille  8
9          Tomas Berdych  9
10 Juan Martin Del Potro 10

When df1 is performed left join with df2, I get results as follows:

> df1 %>% left_join(df2)
Joining, by = "name"
            name id
1   John Ezekial NA
2 Mary Elizabeth  4
3   Fabio Fonini NA
4   Gael Monfils  6
5   Lucas Pouile NA

I want the resulting data frame to be as shown below. The "name" values in df1 should be replaced with "name" values in df2 if there are no exact matches and mapped to their corresponding id's.

   >df3
            name id
1   John Ezekiel 3
2 Mary Elizabeth 4
3   Fabio Fognini 5
4   Gael Monfils 6
5   Lucas Pouille 8

Answer 1

Using Base R you could do something like:

 df2[which(adist(df1$name,df2$name)<2,T)[,2],]
                name id
    3   John Ezekiel  3
    4 Mary Elizabeth  4
    5  Fabio Fognini  5
    6   Gael Monfils  6
    8  Lucas Pouille  8