Implements an approximate string matching version of R's native 'match' function. Can calculate various string distances based on edits (Damerau- Levenshtein, Hamming, Levenshtein, optimal sting alignment), qgrams (q- gram, cosine, jaccard distance) or heuristic metrics (Jaro, Jaro- Winkler). An implementation of soundex is provided as well. Distances can be computed between character vectors while taking proper care of encoding or between integer vectors representing generic sequences.