How do I exact match a string in R?

Question

I have a data frame full of words spelled correctly and incorrectly and a separate list of words gathered from the user. I need to check each word and find the correctly spelled version from the data frame.

The code below works and does exactly as I ask however it's making too many approximations, due to the type of data I'm using, I need it to match the words exactly. Does anyone know how I can do this?

TDM.frame is a term document matrix generated from the user input, which is a csv of thousands of entries.

  spellDB <- read.csv("spellcheck.csv")
  words <- row.names(TDM.frame)
  k <- 0
  wordLoc <- NULL
  badWord <- NULL
  goodWord <-NULL
  for (i in 1:nrow(TDM.frame)){
    if(length(grep(words[i],spellDB$Incorrect))>0){
      k <- k + 1 
      wordLoc[k] <- grep(words[i],spellDB$Incorrect,fixed = TRUE)
      badWord[k] <- words[i]
      goodWord[k] <- as.character(spellDB$Correct[wordLoc[k]])
      corrections <- cbind(goodWord,badWord)
    }
  }

This outputs the following:

> corrections
       goodWord             badWord         
  [1,] "account"            "accounts"      
  [2,] "account"            "accout"        
  [3,] "activate"           "act"           
  [4,] "faction"            "action"        
  [5,] "activate"           "activate"      
  [6,] "activate"           "activated"     

1, 2, 5 and 6 are correct since those are in the spellDB however 3 and 4 are not so should not be matched.

I have tried using this (and other) Regex too however this does not work at all - the only result I ever get is integer(0)

grep(paste0("?=.\\b",words[12],"\\b"),spellDB$Incorrect)

My goal here is to correct the spelling of the data so that the term document matrix is correct and the word counts accurate, if there's a better way to do this then great, this feels like a messy way to handle it but I'm new to R and have not been able to find an alternative.

Thanks for reading!

EDIT: The words list I'm referencing is 1143 entries however the head reads:

> head(words)

[1] "absolute"          "absolutely"        "acceptedcompleted" "accidently"        "accounts"          "accout"      

The spellDB reads like this:

    Correct                                                Incorrect
1   ability                       abilities                         
2   account  aacount accound accoun accountc acount accout accounts 
3 adventure                                      adventur adventures
4    amazon                               amazoncom amazonid amazons
5   android                                                   andoid
6     apple                                                  appleid

EDIT2:

Sadly I can't post all of the dput since some of it is sensitive data.. however I have cut out the offending words, since they are not relevant anyway...

> dput(head(spellDB))
structure(list(Correct = structure(c(1L, 2L, 5L, 8L, 9L, 10L), .Label = c("ability", 
"account", "achievment", "activate", "adventure"), class = "factor"), 
Incorrect = structure(c(4L, 3L, 119L, 120L, 121L, 122L), .Label = c("", 
"", " aacount accound accoun accountc acount accout accounts ", 
" abilities ", " acheiv acheivements acheivment achi achiement achiev achievcement achieve achieved achieveent achievements achievemetn achievments achievmnet achiv achive achived achivement achivements achivment achivmenti achivments achv achviement avhivemnt", 
"andoid", "appleid", "cbind"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("Correct", 
"Incorrect"), row.names = c(NA, 6L), class = "data.frame")`

Answer 1

Your dput ed data didn't work for me, so I recreated it:

spellDB <- read.table(text="    Correct,                                                Incorrect
   ability,                       abilities                         
   account,  aacount accound accoun accountc acount accout accounts 
 adventure,                                      adventur adventures
    amazon,                               amazoncom amazonid amazons
   android ,                                                  andoid
     apple,                                                  appleid", sep=",", as.is=T, header=T)

spellDB[,1] <- gsub(" +", " ", spellDB[,1])
spellDB[,1] <- gsub("^\\s", "", spellDB[,1])
spellDB[,2] <- gsub(" +", " ", spellDB[,2])
spellDB[,2] <- gsub("^\\s|\\s$", "", spellDB[,2])

This solution works, but I'm not sure it will be very effective for your number of rows. It works by checking if each word is present in a big black-list, and if so, it finds what is the respective correct word and adds to the new vector.

incorrects.list <- strsplit(spellDB$Incorrect, " ")
incorrects.unlist <- unlist(incorrects.list)
words <- c("absolute","absolutely","acceptedcompleted","accidently", "accounts","accout")
newwords <- rep(NA, length(words))

for (w in 1:length(words)) {
  if (words[w] %in% incorrects.unlist) {
    pos <- sapply(seq_along(incorrects.list), function(i) (words[w] %in% incorrects.list[[i]]))
    newwords[w] <- spellDB$Correct[pos]
  } else {
    newwords[w] <- words[w]
  }
}