Function to convert strings to their NATO phonetic alphabet equivalents.

This is a simplified version of the StrSpell() function in the DescTools package.

nato <- function(x) {
    y <- factor(strsplit(x, "")[[1]], levels = c(LETTERS, letters, 0:9))
    lett <- c("Alfa", "Bravo", "Charlie", "Delta", "Echo", "Foxtrot", "Golf", "Hotel", "India", 
              "Juliett", "Kilo", "Lima", "Mike", "November", "Oscar", "Papa", "Quebec", "Romeo", 
              "Sierra", "Tango", "Uniform", "Victor", "Whiskey", "Xray", "Yankee", "Zulu")
    numb <- c("Zero", "One", "Two", "Three", "Four", "Five", "Six", "Seven", "Eight", "Nine")
    levels(y) <- c(paste(lett), lett, numb)
    return(as.character(y))
}

Example:

nato("District9")
# [1] "Delta"   "India"   "Sierra"  "Tango"   "Romeo"   "India"   "Charlie" "Tango"   "Nine" 

Example:

nlist <- c("Leonardo", "Raphael", "Donatello", "Michelangelo")
sapply(nlist, nato)

#$Leonardo
#[1] "Lima"     "Echo"     "Oscar"    "November" "Alfa"     "Romeo"    "Delta"   
# [8] "Oscar"   
#
#$Raphael
# [1] "Romeo" "Alfa"  "Papa"  "Hotel" "Alfa"  "Echo"  "Lima" 
#
#$Donatello
# [1] "Delta"    "Oscar"    "November" "Alfa"     "Tango"    "Echo"     "Lima"    
# [8] "Lima"     "Oscar"   
#
#$Michelangelo
# [1] "Mike"     "India"    "Charlie"  "Hotel"    "Echo"     "Lima"    
# [7] "Alfa"     "November" "Golf"     "Echo"     "Lima"     "Oscar"