Clean Text for Cross-Dataset Matching

Standardizes text fields by converting to lowercase, removing punctuation, eliminating common boat prefixes, and normalizing whitespace.

Usage

clean_text(x)

Arguments

x

Character vector to clean

Value

Character vector with cleaned text. Empty strings are converted to NA.

Details

The function performs the following transformations:

• Converts to lowercase

• Replaces punctuation (/, \, -, _, ,, ., :, ;) with spaces

• Removes common boat prefixes (mv, mv., boat, vessel)

• Removes all non-alphanumeric characters except spaces

• Normalizes whitespace (removes extra spaces and trims)

• Converts empty strings to NA