r - How do I do one fuzzy and one exact match in a dataframe?

Question

I want to be able to fuzzy match one column and exact match another column.

Say I df1 looks like this:

And df2 looks like this:

I want to fuzzy match the "Name" but exact match the "Year." So "Ashley" and "Ashlee" would be a match. This is what I have so far:

res <- fuzzy_left_join(
  df,
  df2,
  by=c("Year","Name"),
  list(`==`, function(x,y) stringdist(tolower(x), tolower(y), method="lv") <= 3)
)
res %>% 
  select(Year = Year.x, everything(), - Year.y)

It appears to be over-matching, though. Not sure what's going on.

Answer 1

It seems you are on the right track (hard to tell without your data or you showing us your result!)

The fuzzyjoin will provide all answers with string distance <=3, which may be the "overmatching" you describe.

You can use %>% group_by(Year,Name) %>% slice_min(dist) to get the best answer according to distance.