Filter string with min distance in r
What is wrong with simple code like?:

distances &lt;- adist(candidates, target)
candidates[distances == min(distances)]


This is shorter and, in my opinion, easier to read, as it do not require any knowledge of additional packages.

Also, you mentioned that your data is small and it looks like you are working with vectors, in that case I do not see a point to use data.frame, dplyr etc.