R regex - removing pattern from ends - regex

Suppose I have a string that looks like so:
x <- "NNNNAAAJNFHANFFADN"
How would I only remove the N's from the ends to get:
"AAAJNFHANFFAD"

Just match and remove the N's which exists at the start or at the end through gsub.
gsub("^N+|N+$", "", x)
^N+ matches one or more N's which exists at the start.
| Alternation operator.
N+$ Matches one or more N's which exists at the end.
Example:
> x <- "NNNNAAAJNFHANFFADN"
> gsub("^N+|N+$", "", x)
[1] "AAAJNFHANFFAD"

gsub("^N*([A-Z]*?)N*$", "\\1", x)
You can use \1 to backreference here.See demo.
https://regex101.com/r/uF4oY4/66

Use as
gsub("(^N{1,}|N{1,}$)","",x)
https://regex101.com/r/uF4oY4/69

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.

Regexp to match text with optional text in parenthesis

Given the following vector of strings x
x <- c("hello", "foo_bar", "blah_blub_(bleep)", "blah_(xyz)", "xyz(_$_)")
I am looking for a regexp to extract everything before the optional parenthesis (and its content). So the final result for the above vector should be:
c("hello", "foo_bar", "blah_blub", "blah", "xyz")
I came up with the following regexp which, however, does not work (why?):
R> sub("^(.*)[_?\\(.*\\)]?$", \\1, x)
[1] "hello" "foo_bar" "blah_blub_(bleep)" "blah_(xyz)" "xyz(_$_)"
Any help is appreciated!
We can match the pattern of zero or more _ followed by ( followed by one more characters until the end of the string and replace it with ''.
sub('_*\\(.*$', '', x)
#[1] "hello" "foo_bar" "blah_blub" "blah" "xyz"

r regex Lookbehind Lookahead issue

I try to extract passages like 44.11.36.00-1 (precisely, nn.nn.nn.nn-n, where n stands for any number from 0-9) from text in R.
I want to extract passages if they are "sticked" to non-number marks:
44.11.36.00-1 extracted from nsfghstighsl44.11.36.00-1vsdfgh is OK
44.11.36.00-1 extracted from fa0044.11.36.00-1000 is NOT
I have read that str_extract_all is not working with Lookbehind and Lookahead expressions, so I sadly came back to grep, but cannot deal with it:
> pattern1 <- "(?<![0-9]{1})[0-9]{2}\\.[0-9]{2}\\.[0-9]{2}\\.[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{1}(?![0-9]{1})"
> grep(pattern1, "dyj44.11.36.00-1aregjspotgji 44113600-1 agdtklj441136001 ", perl=TRUE, value = TRUE)
[1] "dyj44.11.36.00-1aregjspotgji 44113600-1 agdtklj441136001 "
which is not the result I expected.
I thought that:
(?<![0-9]{1}) means "match expression which is not preceeded by a number"
[0-9]{2}\\.[0-9]{2}\\.[0-9]{2}\\.[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{1} stands for the expression I seek for
(?![0-9]{1}) means "match expression which is not followed by a number"
You don't actually need lookahead or lookbehind with this approach. Just parenthesize the portion you want extracted:
library(gsubfn)
x <- c("nsfghstighsl44.11.36.00-1vsdfgh", "fa0044.11.36.00-1000") # test data
pat <- "(^|\\D)(\\d{2}[.]\\d{2}[.]\\d{2}[.]\\d{2}-\\d)(\\D|$)"
strapply(x, pat, ~ ..2, simplify = c)
## "44.11.36.00-1"
Note that ~ ..2 is short for the function function(...) ..2 which means grab the match to the second parenthesized portion in the regular expression. We could also have written function(x, y, z) y or x + y + z ~ y .
Note: The question seems to say that a non-numeric must come directly before and after the string but based on comments that have since disappeared it appears that what was really wanted was that the string be either at the beginning or just after a non-number and must either be at the end or folowed by a non-number. The answer has been so modified.
AS #Roland said in his comment, you need to use regmatches instead of grep
> s <- "nsfghstighsl44.11.36.00-1vsdfgh"
> m <- gregexpr("(?<![0-9]{1})[0-9]{2}\\.[0-9]{2}\\.[0-9]{2}\\.[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{1}(?![0-9]{1})", s, perl=TRUE)
> regmatches(s, m)
[1] "44.11.36.00-1"
A reduced one,
> x <- c('nsfghstighsl44.11.36.00-1vsdfgh', 'fa0044.11.36.00-1000')
> m <- gregexpr("(?<!\\d)\\d{2}\\.\\d{2}\\.\\d{2}\\.\\d{2}-\\d(?!\\d)", x, perl=TRUE)
> regmatches(x, m)
[1] "44.11.36.00-1"

Pattern matching and replacement in R

I am not familiar at all with regular expressions, and would like to do pattern matching and replacement in R.
I would like to replace the pattern #1, #2 in the vector: original = c("#1", "#2", "#10", "#11") with each value of the vector vec = c(1,2).
The result I am looking for is the following vector: c("1", "2", "#10", "#11")
I am not sure how to do that. I tried doing:
for(i in 1:2) {
pattern = paste("#", i, sep = "")
original = gsub(pattern, vec[i], original, fixed = TRUE)
}
but I get :
#> original
#[1] "1" "2" "10" "11"
instead of: "1" "2" "#10" "#11"
I would appreciate any help I can get! Thank you!
Specify that you are matching the entire string from start (^) to end ($).
Here, I've matched exactly the conditions you are looking at in this example, but I'm guessing you'll need to extend it:
> gsub("^#([1-2])$", "\\1", original)
[1] "1" "2" "#10" "#11"
So, that's basically, "from the start, look for a hash symbol followed by either the exact number one or two. The one or two should be just one digit (that's why we don't use * or + or something) and also ends the string. Oh, and capture that one or two because we want to 'backreference' it."
Another option using gsubfn:
library(gsubfn)
gsubfn("^#([1-2])$", I, original) ## Function substituting
[1] "1" "2" "#10" "#11"
Or if you want to explicitly use the values of your vector , using vec values:
gsubfn("^#[1-2]$", as.list(setNames(vec,c("#1", "#2"))), original)
Or formula notation equivalent to function notation:
gsubfn("^#([1-2])$", ~ x, original) ## formula substituting
Here's a slightly different take that uses zero width negative lookahead assertion (what a mouthful!). This is the (?!...) which matches # at the start of a string as long as it is not followed by whatever is in .... In this case two (or equivalently, more as long as they are contiguous) digits. It replaces them with nothing.
gsub( "^#(?![0-9]{2})" , "" , original , perl = TRUE )
[1] "1" "2" "#10" "#11"

R: Capitalizing everything after a certain character

I would like to capitalize everything in a character vector that comes after the first _. For example the following vector:
x <- c("NYC_23df", "BOS_3_rb", "mgh_3_3_f")
Should come out like this:
"NYC_23DF" "BOS_3_RB" "mgh_3_3_F"
I have been trying to play with regular expressions, but am not able to do this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
You were very close:
gsub("(_.*)","\\U\\1",x,perl=TRUE)
seems to work. You just needed to use _.* (underscore followed by zero or more other characters) rather than _* (zero or more underscores) ...
To take this apart a bit more:
_.* gives a regular expression pattern that matches an underscore _ followed by any number (including 0) of additional characters; . denotes "any character" and * denotes "zero or more repeats of the previous element"
surrounding this regular expression with parentheses () denotes that it is a pattern we want to store
\\1 in the replacement string says "insert the contents of the first matched pattern", i.e. whatever matched _.*
\\U, in conjunction with perl=TRUE, says "put what follows in upper case" (uppercasing _ has no effect; if we wanted to capitalize everything after (for example) a lower-case g, we would need to exclude the g from the stored pattern and include it in the replacement pattern: gsub("g(.*)","g\\U\\1",x,perl=TRUE))
For more details, search for "replacement" and "capitalizing" in ?gsub (and ?regexp for general information about regular expressions)
gsubfn in the gsubfn package is like gsub except the replacement string can be a function. Here we match _ and everything afterwards feeding the match through toupper :
library(gsubfn)
gsubfn("_.*", toupper, x)
## [1] "NYC_23DF" "BOS_3_RB" "mgh_3_3_F"
Note that this approach involves a particularly simple regular expression.
Simple example using base::strsplit
x <- c("NYC_23df", "BOS_3_rb", "mgh_3_3_f", "a")
myCap <- function(x) {
out <- sapply(x, function(y) {
temp <- unlist(strsplit(y, "_"))
out <- temp[1]
if (length(temp[-1])) {
out <- paste(temp[1], paste(toupper(temp[-1]),
collapse="_"), sep="_")
}
return(out)
})
out
}
> myCap(x)
NYC_23df BOS_3_rb mgh_3_3_f a
"NYC_23DF" "BOS_3_RB" "mgh_3_3_F" "a"
Example using the stringr package
pkg <- "stringr"
if (!require(pkg, character.only=TRUE)) {
install.packages(pkg)
require(pkg, character.only=TRUE)
}
myCap.2 <- function(x) {
out <- sapply(x, function(y) {
idx <- str_locate(y, "_")
if (!all(is.na(idx[1,]))) {
str_sub(y, idx[,1], nchar(y)) <- toupper(str_sub(y, idx[,1], nchar(y)))
}
return(y)
})
out
}
> myCap.2(x)
NYC_23df BOS_3_rb mgh_3_3_f a
"NYC_23DF" "BOS_3_RB" "mgh_3_3_F" "a"