[Rd] Bug in agrep computing edit distance?

[Dickison, Daniel]

I posted this yesterday to r-help and Ben Bolker suggested reposting it
here...

Dickison, Daniel <ddickison <at> carnegielearning.com> writes:

>
> The documentation for agrep says it uses the Levenshtein edit distance,
> but it seems to get this wrong in certain cases when there is a
> combination of deletions and substitutions.  For example:
>
> > agrep("abcd", "abcxyz", max.distance=1)
> [1] 1
>
> That should've been a no-match.  The edit distance between those strings
> is 3 (1 substitution, 2 deletions), but agrep matches with max.distance
>>=
> 1.
>
> I didn't find anything in the bug database, so I was wondering if somehow
> I'm misinterpreting how agrep works.  If not, should I file this in
> Bugzilla?
>

  Could you re-post this on r-devel?  It definitely sounds like
this is worth following up.  Based on a little bit of playing around,
it's quite clear that I don't understand what's going on.  The examples
show things like

agrep("lasy","lazy",max=list(sub=0))

 which makes sense, but

agrep("lasy","lazybc",max=1)
agrep("lasy","lazybc",max=0.001)
agrep("lasy","layt",max=list(all=1))

and

agrep("x",c("x","xy","xyz","xyza"),max=list(insertions=2))
agrep("x",c("x","xy","xyz","xyza"),max=list(deletions=2))
agrep("x",c("x","xy","xyz","xyza"),max=list(all=2))

  all give "1 2 3 4" ??

  this makes it clear that I really don't understand what's going on
based on the documentation.  I tried to trace into the C code
(which calls functions from the TRE regexp library) but that didn't
help much ...



Daniel  Dickison
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ddickison at carnegielearning.com
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