Recognizing synonyms in left_join in R

I have several quite large data tables containing characters, which I would like to join with the entries in my database. The spelling is often not quite right, thus joining is not possible. I know there is no way around creating a synonym table to replace some misspelled characters. But is there a way to automatically detect certain anomalies (see example below)?

My data tables look similar to this:

data <- data.table(products=c("potatoe Chips", "potato Chips", "potato chips", "Potato-chips", "apple", "Apple", "Appl", "Apple Gala"))

The characters in my database are similar to this:

characters.database <- data.table(products=c("Potato Chips", "Potato Chips Paprika", "Apple"), ID=c("1", "2", "3"))

Currently if i perform a left_join only "Apple" will join:

data <- data %>%
  left_join(characters.database, by = c('products'))

Result:

Is it possible to automatically ignore: "Case letters", space" ", "-", and an "e" at the end of a word during left_join?

This would be the table i would like:

Any Ideas?

Thanks Matt Kaye for your suggestion I did something similar now. As I need the correct spelling in the data base and some of my characters contain symbols and numbers which are relevant I did the following:

#data
data <- data.table(products=c("potatoe Chips", "potato Chips", "potato chips", "Potato-chips", "apple", "Apple", "Appl", "Apple Gala"))
characters.database <- data.table(products=c("Potato Chips", "Potato Chips Paprika", "Apple"), ID=c("1", "2", "3"))

#remove spaces and capital letters in data
data <- data %>%
  mutate(products= tolower(products)) %>%
  mutate(products= gsub(" ", "", products))

#add ID to database
characters.database <- characters.database %>%
  dplyr::mutate(ID = row_number())

#remove spaces and capital letters in databasr product names
characters.database_syn <- characters.database %>%
  mutate(products= tolower(products)) %>%
  mutate(products= gsub(" ", "", products))

#join and add correct spelling from database
data <- data %>%
  left_join(characters.database_syn, by = c('products')) %>%
  select(product_syn=products, 'ID') %>%
  left_join(characters.database, by = c('ID'))

#other synonyms have to manually be corrected or with the help of a synonym table (As in MY data special caracters are relevant!)