String split in R skipping first delimiter if multiple delimiters are present - regex

I have "elephant_giraffe_lion" and "monkey_tiger" strings.
The condition here is if there are two or more delimiters, I want to split at the second delimiter and if there is only one delimiter, I want to split at that delimiter. So the results I want to get in this example are "elephant_giraffe" and "monkey".
mystring<-c("elephant_giraffe_lion", "monkey_tiger")
result
"elephant_giraffe" "monkey"

You can anchor your split to the end of the string using $,
unlist(strsplit(mystring, "_[a-z]+$"))
# [1] "elephant_giraffe" "monkey"
Edit
The above only matches the last "_", not accounting for cases where there are more than two "_". For the more general case, you could try
mystring<-c("elephant_giraffe_lion", "monkey_tiger", "dogs", "foo_bar_baz_bap")
tmp <- gsub("([^_]+_[^_]+).*", "\\1", mystring)
tmp[tmp==mystring] <- sapply(strsplit(tmp[tmp==mystring], "_"), `[[`, 1)
tmp
# [1] "elephant_giraffe" "monkey" "dogs" "foo_bar"
You could also use gsubfn, to process the match with a function
library(gsubfn)
f <- function(x,y) if (y==x) strsplit(y, "_")[[1]][[1]] else y
gsubfn("([^_]+_[^_]+).*", f, mystring, backref=1)
# [1] "elephant_giraffe" "monkey" "dogs" "foo_bar"

As I posted an answer on your other related question, a base R solution:
x <- c('elephant_giraffe_lion', 'monkey_tiger', 'foo_bar_baz_bap')
sub('^(?|([^_]*_[^_]*)_.*|([^_]*)_[^_]*)$', '\\1', x, perl=TRUE)
# [1] "elephant_giraffe" "monkey" "foo_bar"

Related

Subdivide an expression into alternative subpattern - using gsub()

I'm trying to subdivide my metacharacter expression in my gsub() function. But it does not return anything found.
Task: I want to delete all sections of string that contain either .ST or -XST in my vector of strings.
As you can see below, using one expression works fine. But the | expression simply does not work. I'm following the metacharacter guide on https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/ItDT/HTML/node84.html
What can be the issue? And what caused this issue?
My data
> rownames(table.summary)[1:10]
[1] "AAK.ST" "ABB.ST" "ALFA.ST" "ALIV-SDB.ST" "AOI.ST" "ATCO-A.ST" "ATCO-B.ST" "AXFO.ST" "AXIS.ST" "AZN.ST"
> gsub(pattern = '[.](.*)$ | [-](.*)$', replacement = "", x = rownames(table.summary)[1:10])
[1] "AAK.ST" "ABB.ST" "ALFA.ST" "ALIV-SDB.ST" "AOI.ST" "ATCO-A.ST" "ATCO-B.ST" "AXFO.ST" "AXIS.ST" "AZN.ST"
> gsub(pattern = '[.](.*)$', replacement = "", x = rownames(table.summary)[1:10])
[1] "AAK" "ABB" "ALFA" "ALIV-SDB" "AOI" "ATCO-A" "ATCO-B" "AXFO" "AXIS" "AZN"
> gsub(pattern = '[-](.*)$', replacement = "", x = rownames(table.summary)[1:10])
[1] "AAK.ST" "ABB.ST" "ALFA.ST" "ALIV" "AOI.ST" "ATCO" "ATCO" "AXFO.ST" "AXIS.ST" "AZN.ST"
It seems you tested your regex with a flag like IgnorePatternWhitespace (VERBOSE, /x) that allows whitespace inside patterns for readability. You can use it with perl=T option:
d <- c("AAK.ST","ABB.ST","ALFA.ST","ALIV-SDB.ST","AOI.ST","ATCO-A.ST","ATCO-B.ST","AXFO.ST", "AXIS.ST","AZN.ST")
gsub('(?x)[.](.*)$ | [-](.*)$', '', d, perl=T)
## [1] "AAK" "ABB" "ALFA" "ALIV" "AOI" "ATCO" "ATCO" "AXFO" "AXIS" "AZN"
However, you really do not have to use that complex regex here.
If you plan to remove all substrings from ther first hyphen or dot up to the end, you may use the following regex:
[.-].*$
The character class [.-] will match the first . or - symbol and .* wil match all characters up to the end of the string ($).
See IDEONE demo:
d <- c("AAK.ST","ABB.ST","ALFA.ST","ALIV-SDB.ST","AOI.ST","ATCO-A.ST","ATCO-B.ST","AXFO.ST", "AXIS.ST","AZN.ST")
gsub("[.-].*$", "", d)
Result: [1] "AAK" "ABB" "ALFA" "ALIV" "AOI" "ATCO" "ATCO" "AXFO" "AXIS" "AZN"
This will find .ST or -XST at the end of the text and substitute it with empty characters string (effectively removing that part). Don't forget that gsub returns modified string, not modifies it in place. You won't see any change until you reassign return value back to some variable.
strings <- c("AAK.ST", "ABB.ST", "ALFA.ST", "ALIV-SDB.ST", "AOI.ST", "ATCO-A.ST", "ATCO-B.ST", "AXFO.ST", "AXIS.ST", "AZN.ST", "AAC-XST", "AAD-XSTV")
strings <- gsub('(\\.ST|-XST)$', '', strings)
Your regular expression ([.](.*)$ | [-](.*)$'), if not for unnecessary spaces, would remove everything from first dot (.) or dash (-) to end of text. This might be what you want, but not what you said you want.

String split with conditions in R

I have this mystring with the delimiter _. The condition here is if there are two or more delimiters, I want to split at the second delimiter and if there is only one delimiter, I want to split at ".Recal" and get the result as shown below.
mystring<-c("MODY_60.2.ReCal.sort.bam","MODY_116.21_C4U.ReCal.sort.bam","MODY_116.3_C2RX-1-10.ReCal.sort.bam","MODY_116.4.ReCal.sort.bam")
result
"MODY_60.2" "MODY_116.21" "MODY_116.3" "MODY_116.4"
You can do this using gsubfn
library(gsubfn)
f <- function(x,y,z) if (z=="_") y else strsplit(x, ".ReCal", fixed=T)[[1]][[1]]
gsubfn("([^_]+_[^_]+)(.).*", f, mystring, backref=2)
# [1] "MODY_60.2" "MODY_116.21" "MODY_116.3" "MODY_116.4"
This allows for cases when you have more than two "_", and you want to split on the second one, for example,
mystring<-c("MODY_60.2.ReCal.sort.bam",
"MODY_116.21_C4U.ReCal.sort.bam",
"MODY_116.3_C2RX-1-10.ReCal.sort.bam",
"MODY_116.4.ReCal.sort.bam",
"MODY_116.4_asdfsadf_1212_asfsdf",
"MODY_116.5.ReCal_asdfsadf_1212_asfsdf", # split by second "_", leaving ".ReCal"
"MODY")
gsubfn("([^_]+_[^_]+)(.).*", f, mystring, backref=2)
# [1] "MODY_60.2" "MODY_116.21" "MODY_116.3" "MODY_116.4"
# [5] "MODY_116.4" "MODY_116.5.ReCal" "MODY"
In the function, f, x is the original string, y and z are the next matches. So, if z is not a "_", then it proceeds with the splitting by the alternative string.
With the stringr package:
str_extract(mystring, '.*?_.*?(?=_)|^.*?_.*(?=\\.ReCal)')
[1] "MODY_60.2" "MODY_116.21" "MODY_116.3" "MODY_116.4"
It also works with more than two delimiters.
Perl/PCRE has the branch reset feature that lets you reuse a group number when you have capturing groups in different alternatives, and is considered as one capturing group.
IMO, this feature is elegant when you want to supply different alternatives.
x <- c('MODY_60.2.ReCal.sort.bam', 'MODY_116.21_C4U.ReCal.sort.bam',
'MODY_116.3_C2RX-1-10.ReCal.sort.bam', 'MODY_116.4.ReCal.sort.bam',
'MODY_116.4_asdfsadf_1212_asfsdf', 'MODY_116.5.ReCal_asdfsadf_1212_asfsdf', 'MODY')
sub('^(?|([^_]*_[^_]*)_.*|(.*)\\.ReCal.*)$', '\\1', x, perl=T)
# [1] "MODY_60.2" "MODY_116.21" "MODY_116.3" "MODY_116.4"
# [5] "MODY_116.4" "MODY_116.5.ReCal" "MODY"
gsub('^(.*\\.\\d+).*','\\1',mystring)
[1] "MODY_60.2" "MODY_116.21" "MODY_116.3" "MODY_116.4"
^([^_\\n]*_[^_\\n]*)(?:_.*|\\.ReCal[^_]*)$
You can simply do using gsub without using any complex regex.Just replace by \\1.See demo.
https://regex101.com/r/wL4aB6/1
A little longer, but needs less regular expression knowledge:
library(stringr)
indx <- str_locate_all(mystring, "_")
for (i in seq_along(indx)) {
if (nrow(indx[[i]]) == 1) {
mystring[i] <- strsplit(mystring[i], ".ReCal")[[1]][1]
} else {
mystring[i] <- substr(mystring[i], start = 1, stop = indx[[i]][2] - 1)
}
}
gregexpr can search for a pattern in strings and give the location.
First, we use gregexpr to find the location of all _ in each element of mystring. Then, we loop through that output and extract the index of second _ within each element of mystring. If there is no second _, it'll return an NA (check inds in the example below).
After that, we can either extract the relevant part using substr based on the extracted index or, if there is NA, we can split the string at .ReCal and keep only the first part.
inds = sapply(gregexpr("_", mystring, fixed = TRUE), function(x) x[2])
ifelse(!is.na(inds),
substr(mystring, 1, inds - 1),
sapply(strsplit(mystring, ".ReCal"), '[', 1))
#[1] "MODY_60.2" "MODY_116.21" "MODY_116.3" "MODY_116.4"

R regular expression: isolate a string between quotes

I have a string myFunction(arg1=\"hop\",arg2=TRUE). I want to isolate what is in between quotes (\"hop\" in this example)
I have tried so far with no success:
gsub(pattern="(myFunction)(\\({1}))(.*)(\\\"{1}.*\\\"{1})(.*)(\\){1})",replacement="//4",x="myFunction(arg1=\"hop\",arg2=TRUE)")
Any help by a regex guru would be welcome!
Try
sub('[^\"]+\"([^\"]+).*', '\\1', x)
#[1] "hop"
Or
sub('[^\"]+(\"[^\"]+.).*', '\\1', x)
#[1] "\"hop\""
The \" is not needed as " would work too
sub('[^"]*("[^"]*.).*', '\\1', x)
#[1] "\"hop\""
If there are multiple matches, as #AvinashRaj mentioned in his post, sub may not be that useful. An option using stringi would be
library(stringi)
stri_extract_all_regex(x1, '"[^"]*"')[[1]]
#[1] "\"hop\"" "\"hop2\""
data
x <- "myFunction(arg1=\"hop\",arg2=TRUE)"
x1 <- "myFunction(arg1=\"hop\",arg2=TRUE arg3=\"hop2\", arg4=TRUE)"
You could use regmatches function also. Sub or gsub only works for a particular input , for general case you must do grabing instead of removing.
> x <- "myFunction(arg1=\"hop\",arg2=TRUE)"
> regmatches(x, gregexpr('"[^"]*"', x))[[1]]
[1] "\"hop\""
To get only the text inside quotes then pass the result of above function to a gsub function which helps to remove the quotes.
> x <- "myFunction(arg1=\"hop\",arg2=TRUE)"
> gsub('"', '', regmatches(x, gregexpr('"([^"]*)"', x))[[1]])
[1] "hop"
> x <- "myFunction(arg1=\"hop\",arg2=\"TRUE\")"
> gsub('"', '', regmatches(x, gregexpr('"([^"]*)"', x))[[1]])
[1] "hop" "TRUE"
You can try:
str='myFunction(arg1=\"hop\",arg2=TRUE)'
gsub('.*(\\".*\\").*','\\1',str)
#[1] "\"hop\""
x <- "myFunction(arg1=\"hop\",arg2=TRUE)"
unlist(strsplit(x,'"'))[2]
# [1] "hop"

strsplit inconsistent with gregexpr

A comment on my answer to this question which should give the desired result using strsplit does not, even though it seems to correctly match the first and last commas in a character vector. This can be proved using gregexpr and regmatches.
So why does strsplit split on each comma in this example, even though regmatches only returns two matches for the same regex?
# We would like to split on the first comma and
# the last comma (positions 4 and 13 in this string)
x <- "123,34,56,78,90"
# Splits on every comma. Must be wrong.
strsplit( x , '^\\w+\\K,|,(?=\\w+$)' , perl = TRUE )[[1]]
#[1] "123" "34" "56" "78" "90"
# Ok. Let's check the positions of matches for this regex
m <- gregexpr( '^\\w+\\K,|,(?=\\w+$)' , x , perl = TRUE )
# Matching positions are at
unlist(m)
[1] 4 13
# And extracting them...
regmatches( x , m )
[[1]]
[1] "," ","
Huh?! What is going on?
The theory of #Aprillion is exact, from R documentation:
The algorithm applied to each input string is
repeat {
if the string is empty
break.
if there is a match
add the string to the left of the match to the output.
remove the match and all to the left of it.
else
add the string to the output.
break.
}
In other words, at each iteration ^ will match the begining of a new string (without the precedent items.)
To simply illustrate this behavior:
> x <- "12345"
> strsplit( x , "^." , perl = TRUE )
[[1]]
[1] "" "" "" "" ""
Here, you can see the consequence of this behavior with a lookahead assertion as delimiter (Thanks to #JoshO'Brien for the link.)

dynamic regex in R

The below code works so long as before and after strings have no characters that are special to a regex:
before <- 'Name of your Manager (note "self" if you are the Manager)' #parentheses cause problem in regex
after <- 'CURRENT FOCUS'
pattern <- paste0(c('(?<=', before, ').*?(?=', after, ')'), collapse='')
ex <- regmatches(x, gregexpr(pattern, x, perl=TRUE))
Does R have a function to escape strings to be used in regexes?
In Perl, there is http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/quotemeta.html for doing exactly that. If the doc is correct when it says
Returns the value of EXPR with all the ASCII non-"word" characters backslashed. (That is, all ASCII characters not matching /[A-Za-z_0-9]/ will be preceded by a backslash in the returned string, regardless of any locale settings.)
then you can achieve the same by doing:
quotemeta <- function(x) gsub("([^A-Za-z_0-9])", "\\\\\\1", x)
And your pattern should be:
pattern <- paste0(c('(?<=', quotemeta(before), ').*?(?=', quotemeta(after), ')'),
collapse='')
Quick sanity check:
a <- "he'l(lo)"
grepl(a, a)
# [1] FALSE
grepl(quotemeta(a), a)
# [1] TRUE
Use \Q...\E to surround the verbatim subpatterns:
# test data
before <- "A."
after <- ".Z"
x <- c("A.xyz.Z", "ABxyzYZ")
pattern <- sprintf('(?<=\\Q%s\\E).*?(?=\\Q%s\\E)', before, after)
which gives:
> gregexpr(pattern, x, perl = TRUE) > 0
[1] TRUE FALSE
dnagirl, such a function exists and is glob2rx
a <- "he'l(lo)"
tt <- glob2rx(a)
# [1] "^he'l\\(lo)$"
before <- 'Name of your Manager (note "self" if you are the Manager)'
tt <- glob2rx(before)
# [1] "^Name of your Manager \\(note \"self\" if you are the Manager)$"
You can just remove the "^" and "$" from the strings by doing:
substr(tt, 2, nchar(tt)-1)
# [1] "he'l\\(lo)"