Grabbing columns with special characters and upper case letters - regex

I have a data frame and I'm trying to loop through the data frame to identify those columns which contain a special character or which are all capital letters.
I have tried a few things but nothing where I'm apple to catch the column names within the loop.
data = data.frame(one=c(1,3,5,1,3,5,1,3,5,1,3,5), two=c(1,3,5,1,3,5,1,3,5,1,3,5),
thr=c("A","B","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","H","I","J"),
fou=c("A","B","D","A","B","D","A","B","D","A","B","D"),
fiv=c(1,3,5,1,3,5,1,3,5,1,3,5),
six=c("A","B","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","H","I","J"),
sev=c("A","B","D","A","B","D","A","B","D","A","B","D"),
eig=c("A","B","D","A","B","D","A","B","D","A","B","D"),
nin=c(1.24,3.52,5.33,1.44,3.11,5.33,1.55,3.66,5.33,1.32,3.54,5.77),
ten=c(1:12),
ele=rep(1,12),
twe=c(1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2),
thir=c("THiS","THAT34","T(&*(", "!!!","#$#","$Q%J","who","THIS","this","this","this","this"),
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
data
colls <- c()
spec=c("$","%","&")
for( col in names(data) ) {
if( length(strings[stringr::str_detect(data[,col], spec)]) >= 1 ){
print("HORRAY")
colls <- c(collls, col)
}
else print ("NOOOOOOOOOO")
}
for( col in names(data) ) {
if( any(data[,col]) %in% spec ){
print("HORRAY")
colls <- c(collls, col)
}
else print ("NOOOOOOOOOO")
}
Can anyone shed light on a good way to tackle this problem.
EDIT:
The end goal is to have a vector with a name of column names which meet that criteria. Sorry for my poor SO question, but hopefully this will help with what I'm trying to do

I would use grep() to search for the pattern you are interested in. See here.
[:upper:] Matches any upper case letters.
Combining it with anchors (^,$) and match one or more times (+) gives ^[[:upper:]]+$ and should only match entries completely in capitals.
The following would match the special characters in your toy data set (but is not guaranteed to match all special characters in your real data set i.e form feeds, carriage returns)
[:punct:] #Matches punctuation - ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? # [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~.
Note that rather than use [:punct:] you could define your special characters manually.
We can try the resultant code on the first row of your data set:
#Using grepl() rather than grep() so that we return a list of logical values.
grepl(x= data[1,], pattern = "^[[:upper:]]+$|[[:punct:]]")
[1] FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE
This gives us our expected response except for column nine which has the value 1.24. Here the decimal point is being recognised as punctuation and is being flagged as a match.
We can add a "negative lookahead assertion" - (?!\\.) - to remove any periods from consideration, before they are even tested for being punctuation characters. Note we use \ to escape the period.
grepl(x= data[1,], perl = TRUE, pattern = "(?!\\.)(^[[:upper:]]+$|[[:punct:]])")
[1] FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE
This returns a better response - it now no longer matches decimal places. NOTE: This might not be what you want as this pattern also won't match any fullstops in character fields. You would need to refine the pattern further.
Rather than use a 'for loop' to reiterate this code across every row in your dataframe I would use vectorization instead which is 'more R like'.
To do this we must convert our script into a function which we will call with apply()
myFunction <- function(x){
matches <- grepl(x= x, perl = TRUE, pattern = "(?!\\.)(^[[:upper:]]+$|[[:punct:]])")
#Given a set of logical vectors 'matches', is at least one of the values true? using any()
return(any(matches))
}
apply(X = data, 1, myFunction)
The 1 above instructs apply() to reiterate across rows rather than columns.
[1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
In your example data set all rows have an entry containing a special character or a string of all capital letters. This is unsurprising as many columns in your example data set are a list of single capital letters.
If you are just interested in which values in column thirteen fit the stated criteria you can use:
matches <- grepl(x= data$thir, perl = TRUE, pattern = "(?!\\.)(^[[:upper:]]+$|[[:punct:]])")
matches
[1] FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE
To subset your dataframe on matching rows:
data[matches,]
one two thr fou fiv six sev eig nin ten ele twe thir
3 5 5 D D 5 D D D 5.33 3 1 1 T(&*(
4 1 1 E A 1 E A A 1.44 4 1 2 !!!
5 3 3 F B 3 F B B 3.11 5 1 1 #$#
6 5 5 G D 5 G D D 5.33 6 1 2 $Q%J
8 3 3 I B 3 I B B 3.66 8 1 2 THIS
To subset your dataframe on non-matching rows:
data[!matches,]
one two thr fou fiv six sev eig nin ten ele twe thir
1 1 1 A A 1 A A A 1.24 1 1 1 THiS
2 3 3 B B 3 B B B 3.52 2 1 2 THAT34
7 1 1 H A 1 H A A 1.55 7 1 1 who
9 5 5 J D 5 J D D 5.33 9 1 1 this
10 1 1 H A 1 H A A 1.32 10 1 2 this
11 3 3 I B 3 I B B 3.54 11 1 1 this
12 5 5 J D 5 J D D 5.77 12 1 2 this
Note that the regular expression used doesn't match THAT34 as it isn't composed wholly of capitalised letters, having the number 34 at the end.
EDIT:
To get a list of column names identifying columns that fulfill the criteria in your edit use myFunction described above with:
colnames(data)[apply(X = data, 2, myFunction)]
"thr" "fou" "six" "sev" "eig" "thir"
The number in apply() changes from 1 to 2 to reiterate across columns rather than rows. We pass the output from apply(), a list of logical matches (TRUE or FALSE), to colnames(data) - this returns the matching column names via subsetting.

I would collapse the data into strings (one string per row)
strings = apply(data, 1, paste, collapse = "")
contains_only_caps = strings == toupper(strings)
strings[contains_only_caps]
# [1] "33BB3BBB3.52 212THAT34" "55DD5DDD5.33 311T(&*(" "11EA1EAA1.44 412!!!" "33FB3FBB3.11 511#$#"
# [5] "55GD5GDD5.33 612$Q%J" "33IB3IBB3.66 812THIS"
# escaping special characters
spec=c("\\$","%","\\&")
contains_spec = stringr::str_detect(strings, pattern = paste(spec, collapse = "|"))
strings[contains_spec]
# [1] "55DD5DDD5.33 311T(&*(" "33FB3FBB3.11 511#$#" "55GD5GDD5.33 612$Q%J"
You could also use which on contains_spec or contains_only_caps to get the corresponding row numbers for the original data frame. I think that using strings rather than row-wise data frame elements will by much faster - as long as you want to search the whole strings, not certain columns for certain conditions.

Related

R regex find ranges in strings

I have a bunch of email subject lines and I'm trying to extract whether a range of values are present. This is how I'm trying to do it but am not getting the results I'd like:
library(stringi)
df1 <- data.frame(id = 1:5, string1 = NA)
df1$string1 <- c('15% off','25% off','35% off','45% off','55% off')
df1$pctOff10_20 <- stri_match_all_regex(df1$string1, '[10-20]%')
id string1 pctOff10_20
1 1 15% off NA
2 2 25% off NA
3 3 35% off NA
4 4 45% off NA
5 5 55% off NA
I'd like something like this:
id string1 pctOff10_20
1 1 15% off 1
2 2 25% off 0
3 3 35% off 0
4 4 45% off 0
5 5 55% off 0
Here is the way to go,
df1$pctOff10_20 <- stri_count_regex(df1$string1, '^(1\\d|20)%')
Explanation:
^ the beginning of the string
( group and capture to \1:
1 '1'
\d digits (0-9)
| OR
20 '20'
) end of \1
% '%'
1) strapply in gsubfn can do that by combining a regex (pattern= argument) and a function (FUN= argument). Below we use the formula representation of the function. Alternately we could make use of betweeen from data.table (or a number of other packages). This extracts the matches to the pattern, applies the function to it and returns the result simplifying it into a vector (rather than a list):
library(gsubfn)
btwn <- function(x, a, b) as.numeric(a <= as.numeric(x) & as.numeric(x) <= b)
transform(df1, pctOff10_20 =
strapply(
X = string1,
pattern = "\\d+",
FUN = ~ btwn(x, 10, 20),
simplify = TRUE
)
)
2) A base solution using the same btwn function defined above is:
transform(df1, pctOff10_20 = btwn(gsub("\\D", "", string1), 10, 20))

R separating out number and units from a column in a dataframe

I have a dataframe which contains a column that has numbers as well as variable units:
num <- c(1:5)
val <- c("5%","10K", "100.2mv","1.4g","1.007kbars")
df <- data.frame(num,val)
df
How can I create two new columns from df$val, one that contains just the number and one the units?
Thank you for your help.
Here's a solution using stringr:
library(stringr)
df$extr_nums <- str_extract(val, "\\d+\\.?\\d*")
df$extr_units <- str_replace(val, nums, "")
df
num val extr_nums extr_units
1 1 5% 5 %
2 2 10K 10 K
3 3 100.2mv 100.2 mv
4 4 1.4g 1.4 g
5 5 1.007kbars 1.007 kbars
The regexp is translated as: "at least 1 digit, followed by optional dot, followed by optional digits".

Stata: Counting number of consecutive occurrences of a pre-defined length

Observations in my data set contain the history of moves for each player. I would like to count the number of consecutive series of moves of some pre-defined length (2, 3 and more than 3 moves) in the first and the second halves of the game. The sequences cannot overlap, i.e. the sequence 1111 should be considered as a sequence of the length 4, not 2 sequences of length 2. That is, for an observation like this:
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| Move1 | Move2 | Move3 | Move4 | Move5 | Move6 | Move7 | Move8 |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | . | . | 1 | 1 |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
…the following variables should be generated:
Number of sequences of 2 in the first half =0
Number of sequences of 2 in the second half =1
Number of sequences of 3 in the first half =0
Number of sequences of 3 in the second half =0
Number of sequences of >3 in the first half =1
Number of sequences of >3 in the second half = 0
I have two potential options of how to proceed with this task but neither of those leads to the final solution:
Option 1: Elaborating on Nick’s tactical suggestion to use strings (Stata: Maximum number of consecutive occurrences of the same value across variables), I have concatenated all “move*” variables and tried to identify the starting position of a substring:
egen test1 = concat(move*)
gen test2 = subinstr(test1,"11","X",.) // find all consecutive series of length 2
There are several problems with Option 1:
(1) it does not account for cases with overlapping sequences (“1111” is recognized as 2 sequences of 2)
(2) it shortens the resulting string test2 so that positions of X no longer correspond to the starting positions in test1
(3) it does not account for variable length of substring if I need to check for sequences of the length greater than 3.
Option 2: Create an auxiliary set of variables to identify the starting positions of the consecutive set (sets) of the 1s of some fixed predefined length. Building on the earlier example, in order to count sequences of length 2, what I am trying to get is an auxiliary set of variables that will be equal to 1 if the sequence of started at a given move, and zero otherwise:
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| Move1 | Move2 | Move3 | Move4 | Move5 | Move6 | Move7 | Move8 |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
My code looks as follows but it breaks when I am trying to restart counting consecutive occurrences:
quietly forval i = 1/42 {
gen temprow`i' =.
egen rowsum = rownonmiss(seq1-seq`i') //count number of occurrences
replace temprow`i'=rowsum
mvdecode seq1-seq`i',mv(1) if rowsum==2
drop rowsum
}
Does anyone know a way of solving the task?
Assume a string variable concatenating all moves all (the name test1 is hardly evocative).
FIRST TRY: TAKING YOUR EXAMPLE LITERALLY
From your example with 8 moves, the first half of the game is moves 1-4 and the second half moves 5-8. Thus there is for each half only one way to have >3 moves, namely that there are 4 moves. In that case each substring will be "1111" and counting reduces to testing for the one possibility:
gen count_1_4 = substr(all, 1, 4) == "1111"
gen count_2_4 = substr(all, 5, 4) == "1111"
Extending this approach, there are only two ways to have 3 moves in sequence:
gen count_1_3 = inlist(substr(all, 1, 4), "111.", ".111")
gen count_2_3 = inlist(substr(all, 5, 4), "111.", ".111")
In similar style, there can't be two instances of 2 moves in sequence in each half of the game as that would qualify as 4 moves. So, at most there is one instance of 2 moves in sequence in each half. That instance must match either of two patterns, "11." or ".11". ".11." is allowed, so either includes both. We must also exclude any false match with a sequence of 3 moves, as just mentioned.
gen count_1_2 = (strpos(substr(all, 1, 4), "11.") | strpos(substr(all, 1, 4), ".11") ) & !count_1_3
gen count_2_2 = (strpos(substr(all, 5, 4), "11.") | strpos(substr(all, 5, 4), ".11") ) & !count_2_3
The result of each strpos() evaluation will be positive if a match is found and (arg1 | arg2) will be true (1) if either argument is positive. (For Stata, non-zero is true in logical evaluations.)
That's very much tailored to your particular problem, but not much worse for that.
P.S. I didn't try hard to understand your code. You seem to be confusing subinstr() with strpos(). If you want to know positions, subinstr() cannot help.
SECOND TRY
Your last code segment implies that your example is quite misleading: if there can be 42 moves, the approach above can not be extended without pain. You need a different approach.
Let's suppose that the string variable all can be 42 characters long. I will set aside the distinction between first and second halves, which can be tackled by modifying this approach. At its simplest, just split the history into two variables, one for the first half and one for the second and repeat the approach twice.
You can clone the history by
clonevar work = all
gen length1 = .
gen length2 = .
and set up your count variables. Here count_4 will hold counts of 4 or more.
gen count_4 = 0
gen count_3 = 0
gen count_2 = 0
First we look for move sequences of length 42, ..., 2. Every time we find one, we blank it out and bump up the count.
qui forval j = 42(-1)2 {
replace length1 = length(work)
local pattern : di _dup(`j') "1"
replace work = subinstr(work, "`pattern'", "", .)
replace length2 = length(work)
if `j' >= 4 {
replace count4 = count4 + (length1 - length2) / `j'
}
else if `j' == 3 {
replace count3 = count3 + (length1 - length2) / 3
}
else if `j' == 2 {
replace count2 = count2 + (length1 - length2) / 2
}
}
The important details here are
If we delete (repeated instances of) a pattern and measure the change in length, we have just deleted (change in length) / (length of pattern) instances of that pattern. So, if I look for "11" and found that the length decreased by 4, I just found two instances.
Working downwards and deleting what we found ensures that we don't find false positives, e.g. if "1111111" is deleted, we don't find later "111111", "11111", ..., "11" which are included within it.
Deletion implies that we should work on a clone in order not to destroy what is of interest.

R- regex index of start postion and then add it to a string?

So far i have been able to merge two files and get the following dataframe (df1):
ID someLength someLongerSeq someSeq someMOD someValue
A 16 XCVBNMHGFDSTHJGF NMH T3(P) 7
A 16 XCVBNMHGFDSTHJGF NmH M3(O); S4(P); S6(P) 1
B 24 HDFGKJSDHFGKJSDFHGKLSJDF HFGKJSDFH S9(P) 5
C 22 QIOWEURQOIWERERQWEFFFF RQoIWERER Q16(D); S19(P) 7
D 19 HSEKDFGSFDKELJGFZZX KELJ S7(P); C9(C); S10(P) 1
i am looking for a way to do a regex match based on "someSeq" column to look for that substring in the "someLongersSeq" column and get the start location of the match and then add that to the whole numbers that are attached to the characters such as T3(P).
Example:
For the second row "ID:A","someSeq":"NmH" matches starts at location 4 of the someLongerSeq (after to upper conversion of NmH). So i want to add that number 4 to someMOD fields M3(O);S4(P);S6(P) so that i get M7(O);S8(P);S10(P) and then overwrite the new value in the someMOD column.
And do that for each row. Regex is per row bases.
Any help is really appreciated. Thanks.
First of all, I should mention that it is hard to read your data. I slightly modify it( I remove spaces from someMOD column) to read them. This is not a problem since you have already your data into a data.frame. So I read the data like this :
dat <- read.table(text='ID someLength someLongerSeq someSeq someMOD someValue
A 16 XCVBNMHGFDSTHJGF NMH T3(P) 7
A 16 XCVBNMHGFDSTHJGF NmH M3(O);S4(P);S6(P) 1
B 24 HDFGKJSDHFGKJSDFHGKLSJDF HFGKJSDFH S9(P) 5
C 22 QIOWEURQOIWERERQWEFFFF RQoIWERER Q16(D);S19(P) 7
D 19 HSEKDFGSFDKELJGFZZX KELJ S7(P);C9(C);S10(P) 1',header=TRUE)
Then the idea is:
to process row by row using apply
use gregexpr to get the index of someSeq into someLongerSeq
use gsubfn to add the previous index to its digit of someMOD
Here the whole solution:
library(gsubfn)
res <- t(apply(dat,1,function(x){
idx <- gregexpr(x['someSeq'],x['someLongerSeq'],
ignore.case = TRUE)[[1]][1]
x[['someMOD']] <- gsubfn("[[:digit:]]+",
function(x) as.numeric(x)+idx,
x[['someMOD']])
x
}))
as.data.frame(res)
ID someLength someLongerSeq someSeq someMOD someValue
1 A 16 XCVBNMHGFDSTHJGF NMH T8(P) 7
2 A 16 XCVBNMHGFDSTHJGF NmH M8(O);S9(P);S11(P) 1
3 B 24 HDFGKJSDHFGKJSDFHGKLSJDF HFGKJSDFH S18(P) 5
4 C 22 QIOWEURQOIWERERQWEFFFF RQoIWERER Q23(D);S26(P) 7
5 D 19 HSEKDFGSFDKELJGFZZX KELJ S18(P);C20(C);S21(P) 1

How to calculate the number of occurrence of a given character in each row of a column of strings?

I have a data.frame in which certain variables contain a text string. I wish to count the number of occurrences of a given character in each individual string.
Example:
q.data<-data.frame(number=1:3, string=c("greatgreat", "magic", "not"))
I wish to create a new column for q.data with the number of occurence of "a" in string (ie. c(2,1,0)).
The only convoluted approach I have managed is:
string.counter<-function(strings, pattern){
counts<-NULL
for(i in 1:length(strings)){
counts[i]<-length(attr(gregexpr(pattern,strings[i])[[1]], "match.length")[attr(gregexpr(pattern,strings[i])[[1]], "match.length")>0])
}
return(counts)
}
string.counter(strings=q.data$string, pattern="a")
number string number.of.a
1 1 greatgreat 2
2 2 magic 1
3 3 not 0
The stringr package provides the str_count function which seems to do what you're interested in
# Load your example data
q.data<-data.frame(number=1:3, string=c("greatgreat", "magic", "not"), stringsAsFactors = F)
library(stringr)
# Count the number of 'a's in each element of string
q.data$number.of.a <- str_count(q.data$string, "a")
q.data
# number string number.of.a
#1 1 greatgreat 2
#2 2 magic 1
#3 3 not 0
If you don't want to leave base R, here's a fairly succinct and expressive possibility:
x <- q.data$string
lengths(regmatches(x, gregexpr("a", x)))
# [1] 2 1 0
nchar(as.character(q.data$string)) -nchar( gsub("a", "", q.data$string))
[1] 2 1 0
Notice that I coerce the factor variable to character, before passing to nchar. The regex functions appear to do that internally.
Here's benchmark results (with a scaled up size of the test to 3000 rows)
q.data<-q.data[rep(1:NROW(q.data), 1000),]
str(q.data)
'data.frame': 3000 obs. of 3 variables:
$ number : int 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 ...
$ string : Factor w/ 3 levels "greatgreat","magic",..: 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 ...
$ number.of.a: int 2 1 0 2 1 0 2 1 0 2 ...
benchmark( Dason = { q.data$number.of.a <- str_count(as.character(q.data$string), "a") },
Tim = {resT <- sapply(as.character(q.data$string), function(x, letter = "a"){
sum(unlist(strsplit(x, split = "")) == letter) }) },
DWin = {resW <- nchar(as.character(q.data$string)) -nchar( gsub("a", "", q.data$string))},
Josh = {x <- sapply(regmatches(q.data$string, gregexpr("g",q.data$string )), length)}, replications=100)
#-----------------------
test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self user.child sys.child
1 Dason 100 4.173 9.959427 2.985 1.204 0 0
3 DWin 100 0.419 1.000000 0.417 0.003 0 0
4 Josh 100 18.635 44.474940 17.883 0.827 0 0
2 Tim 100 3.705 8.842482 3.646 0.072 0 0
Another good option, using charToRaw:
sum(charToRaw("abc.d.aa") == charToRaw('.'))
The stringi package provides the functions stri_count and stri_count_fixed which are very fast.
stringi::stri_count(q.data$string, fixed = "a")
# [1] 2 1 0
benchmark
Compared to the fastest approach from #42-'s answer and to the equivalent function from the stringr package for a vector with 30.000 elements.
library(microbenchmark)
benchmark <- microbenchmark(
stringi = stringi::stri_count(test.data$string, fixed = "a"),
baseR = nchar(test.data$string) - nchar(gsub("a", "", test.data$string, fixed = TRUE)),
stringr = str_count(test.data$string, "a")
)
autoplot(benchmark)
data
q.data <- data.frame(number=1:3, string=c("greatgreat", "magic", "not"), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
test.data <- q.data[rep(1:NROW(q.data), 10000),]
A variation of https://stackoverflow.com/a/12430764/589165 is
> nchar(gsub("[^a]", "", q.data$string))
[1] 2 1 0
I'm sure someone can do better, but this works:
sapply(as.character(q.data$string), function(x, letter = "a"){
sum(unlist(strsplit(x, split = "")) == letter)
})
greatgreat magic not
2 1 0
or in a function:
countLetter <- function(charvec, letter){
sapply(charvec, function(x, letter){
sum(unlist(strsplit(x, split = "")) == letter)
}, letter = letter)
}
countLetter(as.character(q.data$string),"a")
You could just use string division
require(roperators)
my_strings <- c('apple', banana', 'pear', 'melon')
my_strings %s/% 'a'
Which will give you 1, 3, 1, 0. You can also use string division with regular expressions and whole words.
The question below has been moved here, but it seems this page doesn't directly answer to Farah El's question.
How to find number 1s in 101 in R
So, I'll write an answer here, just in case.
library(magrittr)
n %>% # n is a number you'd like to inspect
as.character() %>%
str_count(pattern = "1")
https://stackoverflow.com/users/8931457/farah-el
Yet another base R option could be:
lengths(lapply(q.data$string, grepRaw, pattern = "a", all = TRUE, fixed = TRUE))
[1] 2 1 0
The next expression does the job and also works for symbols, not only letters.
The expression works as follows:
1: it uses lapply on the columns of the dataframe q.data to iterate over the rows of the column 2 ("lapply(q.data[,2],"),
2: it apply to each row of the column 2 a function "function(x){sum('a' == strsplit(as.character(x), '')[[1]])}".
The function takes each row value of column 2 (x), convert to character (in case it is a factor for example), and it does the split of the string on every character ("strsplit(as.character(x), '')"). As a result we have a a vector with each character of the string value for each row of the column 2.
3: Each vector value of the vector is compared with the desired character to be counted, in this case "a" (" 'a' == "). This operation will return a vector of True and False values "c(True,False,True,....)", being True when the value in the vector matches the desired character to be counted.
4: The total times the character 'a' appears in the row is calculated as the sum of all the 'True' values in the vector "sum(....)".
5: Then it is applied the "unlist" function to unpack the result of the "lapply" function and assign it to a new column in the dataframe ("q.data$number.of.a<-unlist(....")
q.data$number.of.a<-unlist(lapply(q.data[,2],function(x){sum('a' == strsplit(as.character(x), '')[[1]])}))
>q.data
# number string number.of.a
#1 greatgreat 2
#2 magic 1
#3 not 0
Another base R answer, not so good as those by #IRTFM and #Finn (or as those using stringi/stringr), but better than the others:
sapply(strsplit(q.data$string, split=""), function(x) sum(x %in% "a"))
q.data<-data.frame(number=1:3, string=c("greatgreat", "magic", "not"))
q.data<-q.data[rep(1:NROW(q.data), 3000),]
library(rbenchmark)
library(stringr)
library(stringi)
benchmark( Dason = {str_count(q.data$string, "a") },
Tim = {sapply(q.data$string, function(x, letter = "a"){sum(unlist(strsplit(x, split = "")) == letter) }) },
DWin = {nchar(q.data$string) -nchar( gsub("a", "", q.data$string, fixed=TRUE))},
Markus = {stringi::stri_count(q.data$string, fixed = "a")},
Finn={nchar(gsub("[^a]", "", q.data$string))},
tmmfmnk={lengths(lapply(q.data$string, grepRaw, pattern = "a", all = TRUE, fixed = TRUE))},
Josh1 = {sapply(regmatches(q.data$string, gregexpr("g",q.data$string )), length)},
Josh2 = {lengths(regmatches(q.data$string, gregexpr("g",q.data$string )))},
Iago = {sapply(strsplit(q.data$string, split=""), function(x) sum(x %in% "a"))},
replications =100, order = "elapsed")
test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self user.child sys.child
4 Markus 100 0.076 1.000 0.076 0.000 0 0
3 DWin 100 0.277 3.645 0.277 0.000 0 0
1 Dason 100 0.290 3.816 0.291 0.000 0 0
5 Finn 100 1.057 13.908 1.057 0.000 0 0
9 Iago 100 3.214 42.289 3.215 0.000 0 0
2 Tim 100 6.000 78.947 6.002 0.000 0 0
6 tmmfmnk 100 6.345 83.487 5.760 0.003 0 0
8 Josh2 100 12.542 165.026 12.545 0.000 0 0
7 Josh1 100 13.288 174.842 13.268 0.028 0 0
The easiest and the cleanest way IMHO is :
q.data$number.of.a <- lengths(gregexpr('a', q.data$string))
# number string number.of.a`
#1 1 greatgreat 2`
#2 2 magic 1`
#3 3 not 0`
s <- "aababacababaaathhhhhslsls jsjsjjsaa ghhaalll"
p <- "a"
s2 <- gsub(p,"",s)
numOcc <- nchar(s) - nchar(s2)
May not be the efficient one but solve my purpose.