I have a text and I want to replace a text block in a line, like that:
"\t\t\tFGHGFJKJKJKGDSJS"
with
x= "ABCCCBBHHJJJH"
I'm interested in changing just the text block (FGHGFJKJKJKGDSJS) without modyfing the presence of other special characters. So obtaining:
"\t\t\tABCCCBBHHJJJH"
Do it exist a way to replace FGHGFJKJKJKGDSJS without clearly specify the exact combination of letters?
I found a solution in this way: txt[n° of the line] = paste0(\t,\t,\t,x)
But I would like to know whether there is a more general solution.
> library(stringr)
> mystring <- "\t\t\tFGHGFJKJKJKGDSJS"
> x <- "ABCCCBBHHJJJH"
> str_replace(mystring,"\\w+",x)
[1] "\t\t\tABCCCBBHHJJJH"
\w+mean match any character or number or underscore at least once and as many as possible. So each part not a normal char will be replace by your x variable.
> a = "\t\t\tDFGGD"
> gsub("(\t\t\t).*","\\1ABCDF",a)
[1] "\t\t\tABCDF
mystring <- "\t\t\tFGHGFJKJKJKGDSJS"
x <- "ABCCCBBHHJJJH"
sub('\\w+',x,mystring,ignore.case=T)
Related
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.
I have an equation as a string where the variables in the string equation are variables in the R workspace. I would like to replace each variable with its numeric value in the R workspace. This is easy enough when the variable names don't contain punctuation.
Here is a simple example.
x <- 5
y <- 10
yy <- 15
z <- x*(y + yy)
zAsChar <- "z=x*(y+yy)"
vars <- unlist(strsplit(zAsChar, "[[:punct:]]"))
notVars <- unlist(strsplit(zAsChar, "[^[:punct:]]"))
varsValues <- sapply(vars[vars != ""], FUN=function(aaa) get(aaa))
notVarsValues <- notVars[notVars != ""]
paste(paste0(varsValues, notVarsValues), collapse="")
This yields "125=5*(10+15)", which is great.
However, I would love the option to use underscores in the variable names so that I can use "subscripts" for variable names. I am using these strings in math mode in R markdown.
So I need a [:punct:] that excludes _. I tried using [\\+\\-\\*\\/\\(\\)\\=] rather than [:punct:], but with this approach I couldn't split on the minus sign. Is there a way to preserve the _?
Instead of [:punct:] use the unicode character class \pP (shortcut for \p{P}) and its negation \PP to do that:
[^\\PP_]
(It works with perl=TRUE option)
Are you sure you need to do all this string manipulation? The substitute() function can help you out
substitute(z==x*(y+yy), list(x=x, y=y, yy=yy,z=z))
Or if you really need to start with a character value
do.call("substitute", list(parse(text=zAsChar)[[1]],list(x=x, y=y, yy=yy,z=z)))
# 125 = 5 * (10 + 15)
You can deparse() the result to turn it back into a character.
I have seen a few questions concerning returning the position of a character with a String in R, but maybe I cannot seem to figure it out for my case. I think this is because I'm trying to do it for a whole column rather than a single string, but it could just be my struggles with regex.
Right now, I have a data.frame with a column, df$id that looks something like 13.23-45-6A. The number of digits before the period is variable, but I would like to retain just the part of the string after the period for each row in the column. I would like to do something like:
df$new <- substring(df$id, 1 + indexOf(".", df$id))
So 12.23-45-6A would become 23-45-6A, 0.1B would become 1B, 4.A-A would become A-A and so on for an entire column.
Right now I have:
df$new <- substr(df$id, 1 + regexpr("\\\.", data.count$id),99)
Thanks for any advice.
As #AnandaMahto mentioned his comment, you would probably be better simplifying things and using gsub:
> x <- c("13.23-45-6A", "0.1B", "4.A-A")
> gsub("[0-9]*\\.(.*)", "\\1", x, perl = T, )
[1] "23-45-6A" "1B" "A-A"
To make this work with your existing data frame you can try:
df$id <- gsub("[0-9]*\\.(.*)", "\\1", df$id, perl = T, )
another way is to use strsplit. Using #Tims example
x <- c("13.23-45-6A", "0.1B", "4.A-A")
sapply(strsplit(x, "\\."), "[", -1)
"23-45-6A" "1B" "A-A"
You could remove the characters including the . using
sub('[^.]*\\.', '', x)
#[1] "23-45-6A" "1B" "A-A"
data
x <- c("13.23-45-6A", "0.1B", "4.A-A")
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])$", ~ x, original) ## formula substituting
Here's a slightly different take that uses zero width negative lookahead assertion (what a mouthful!). This is the (?!...) which matches # at the start of a string as long as it is not followed by whatever is in .... In this case two (or equivalently, more as long as they are contiguous) digits. It replaces them with nothing.
gsub( "^#(?![0-9]{2})" , "" , original , perl = TRUE )
[1] "1" "2" "#10" "#11"
I need to replace string A with string B, only when string A is a whole word (e.g. "MECH"), and I don't want to make the replacement when A is a part of a longer string (e.g. "MECHANICAL"). So far, I have a grepl() which checks if string A is a whole string, but I cannot figure out how to make the replacement. I have added an ifelse() with the idea to makes the gsub() replacement when grep() returns TRUE, otherwise not to replace. Any suggestions? Please see the code below. Thanks.
aa <- data.frame(type = c("CONSTR", "MECH CONSTRUCTION", "MECHANICAL CONSTRUCTION MECH", "MECH CONSTR", "MECHCONSTRUCTION"))
from <- c("MECH", "MECHANICAL", "CONSTR", "CONSTRUCTION")
to <- c("MECHANICAL", "MECHANICAL", "CONSTRUCTION", "CONSTRUCTION")
gsub2 <- function(pattern, replacement, x, ...) {
for(i in 1:length(pattern)){
reg <- paste0("(^", pattern[i], "$)|(^", pattern[i], " )|( ", pattern[i], "$)|( ", pattern[i], " )")
ifelse(grepl(reg, aa$type),
x <- gsub(pattern[i], replacement[i], x, ...),
aa$type)
}
x
}
aa$title3 <- gsub2(from, to, aa$type)
You can enclose the strings in the from vector in \\< and \\> to match only whole words:
x <- c("CONSTR", "MECH CONSTRUCTION", "MECHANICAL CONSTRUCTION MECH",
"MECH CONSTR", "MECHCONSTRUCTION")
from <- c("\\<MECH\\>", "\\<CONSTR\\>")
to <- c("MECHANICAL", "CONSTRUCTION")
for(i in 1:length(from)){
x <- gsub(from[i], to[i], x)
}
print(x)
# [1] "CONSTRUCTION" "MECHANICAL CONSTRUCTION"
# [3] "MECHANICAL CONSTRUCTION MECHANICAL" "MECHANICAL CONSTRUCTION"
# [5] "MECHCONSTRUCTION"
I use regex (?<=\W|^)MECH(?=\W|$) to get if inside the string contain whole word MECH like this.
Is that what you need?
Just for posterity, other than using the \< \> enclosure, a whole word can be defined as any string ending in a space or end-of-line (\s|$).
gsub("MECH(\\s|$)", "MECHANICAL\\1", aa$type)
The only problem with this approach is that you need to carry over the space or end-of-line that you used as part of the match, hence the encapsulation in parentheses and the backreference (\1).
The \< \> enclosure is superior for this particular question, since you have no special exceptions. However, if you have exceptions, it is better to use a more explicit method. The more tools in your toolbox, the better.