In R, is there a better/simpler way than the following of finding the location of the last dot in a string?
x <- "hello.world.123.456"
g <- gregexpr(".", x, fixed=TRUE)
loc <- g[[1]]
loc[length(loc)] # returns 16
This finds all the dots in the string and then returns the last one, but it seems rather clumsy. I tried using regular expressions, but didn't get very far.
Does this work for you?
x <- "hello.world.123.456"
g <- regexpr("\\.[^\\.]*$", x)
g
\. matches a dot
[^\.] matches everything but a dot
* specifies that the previous expression (everything but a dot) may occur between 0 and unlimited times
$ marks the end of the string.
Taking everything together: find a dot that is followed by anything but a dot until the string ends. R requires \ to be escaped, hence \\ in the expression above. See regex101.com to experiment with regex.
How about a minor syntax improvement?
This will work for your literal example where the input vector is of length 1. Use escapes to get a literal "." search, and reverse the result to get the last index as the "first":
rev(gregexpr("\\.", x)[[1]])[1]
A more proper vectorized version (in case x is longer than 1):
sapply(gregexpr("\\.", x), function(x) rev(x)[1])
and another tidier option to use tail instead:
sapply(gregexpr("\\.", x), tail, 1)
Someone posted the following answer which I really liked, but I notice that they've deleted it:
regexpr("\\.[^\\.]*$", x)
I like it because it directly produces the desired location, without having to search through the results. The regexp is also fairly clean, which is a bit of an exception where regexps are concerned :)
There is a slick stri_locate_last function in the stringi package, that can accept both literal strings and regular expressions.
To just find a dot, no regex is required, and it is as easy as
stringi::stri_locate_last_fixed(x, ".")[,1]
If you need to use this function with a regex, to find the location of the last regex match in the string, you should replace _fixed with _regex:
stringi::stri_locate_last_regex(x, "\\.")[,1]
Note the . is a special regex metacharacter and should be escaped when used in a regex to match a literal dot char.
See an R demo online:
x <- "hello.world.123.456"
stringi::stri_locate_last_fixed(x, ".")[,1]
stringi::stri_locate_last_regex(x, "\\.")[,1]
Related
I'm working with a character vector of the following format:
[-0.2122,-0.1213)
[-0.2750,-0.2122)
[-0.1213,-0.0222)
[-0.1213,-0.0222)
I would like to remove [ and ) so I can get the desired result resembling:
-0.2122,-0.1213
-0.2750,-0.2122
-0.1213,-0.0222
-0.1213,-0.0222
Attempts
1 - Groups,
I was thinking of capturing first and second group, on the lines of the syntax:
[[^\[{1}(?![[:digit:]])\){1}
but it doesn't seem to work, (regex101).
2 - Punctuation
The code: [[:punct:]] will capture all punctuation regex101.
3 - Groups again
Then I tried to match the two groups: (\[)(\)), but, again, no lack regex101.
The problem can be easily solved by applying gsub twice or making use of the multigsub available in the qdap package but I'm interested in solving this via one expression, is possible.
You could try using lookaheads and lookbehinds in Perl-style regular expressions.
x <- scan(what = character(),
text = "[-0.2122,-0.1213)
[-0.2750,-0.2122)
[-0.1213,-0.0222)
[-0.1213,-0.0222)")
regmatches(x, regexpr("(?<=\\[).+(?=\\))", x, perl = TRUE))
# [1] "-0.2122,-0.1213" "-0.2750,-0.2122" "-0.1213,-0.0222" "-0.1213,-0.0222"
I'm trying to match an exact substring using grep. I'm using the following expression:
grep("^.*apple().*$",inputString)
Expected output:
1) input string is "apple()" - expected to match
2) input string is "appleSomethingElse()" - expected not to match
Case 1 works and I get a match. However case two also matches. I'm trying to write a regular expression that only matches when "apple" and "()" are next to each other in the string. Is my expression wrong?
When, you have metacharacters in your expression that you want to match, you can simply use the fixed = TRUE argument within grep and thus leave your expression simple.
x <- c('apple()', 'appleSomethingElse()', 'adadaapple()aaa')
grep('apple()', x, fixed = TRUE)
## [1] 1 3
We need to escape (\\) the parentheses (()) to make this work using the same syntax as in the OP's code.
grep("^.*apple\\(\\).*$", x)
#[1] 1 3
As #DavidArenburg mentioned in the comments, if this is for matching a string instead of substring, == would be more useful.
x=='apple()'
#[1] TRUE FALSE FALSE
data
x <- c('apple()', 'appleSomethingElse()', 'adadaapple()aaa')
So I've bought a book on R and automated data collection, and one of the first examples are leaving me baffled.
I have a table with a date-column consisting of numbers looking like this "2001-". According to the tutorial, the line below will remove the "-" from the dates by singling out the first four digits:
yend_clean <- unlist(str_extract_all(danger_table$yend, "[[:digit:]]4$"))
When I run this command, "yend_clean" is simply set to "character (empty)".
If I remove the ”4$", I get all of the dates split into atoms so that the list that originally looked like this "1992", "2003" now looks like this "1", "9" etc.
So I suspect that something around the "4$" is the problem. I can't find any documentation on this that helps me figure out the correct solution.
Was hoping someone in here could point me in the right direction.
This is a regular expression question. Your regular expression is wrong. Use:
unlist(str_extract_all("2003-", "^[[:digit:]]{4}"))
or equivalently
sub("^(\\d{4}).*", "\\1", "2003-")
of if really all you want is to remove the "-"
sub("-", "", "2003-")
Repetition in regular expressions is controlled by the {} parameter. You were missing that. Additionally $ means match the end of the string, so your expression translates as:
match any single digit, followed by a 4, followed by the end of the string
When you remove the "4", then the pattern becomes "match any single digit", which is exactly what happens (i.e. you get each digit matched separately).
The pattern I propose says instead:
match the beginning of the string (^), followed by a digit repeated four times.
The sub variation is a very common technique where we create a pattern that matches what we want to keep in parentheses, and then everything else outside of the parentheses (.* matches anything, any number of times). We then replace the entire match with just the piece in the parens (\\1 means the first sub-expression in parentheses). \\d is equivalent to [[:digit:]].
A good website to learn about regex
A visualization tool to see how specific regular expressions match strings
If you mean the book Automated Data Collection with R, the code could be like this:
yend_clean <- unlist(str_extract_all(danger_table$yend, "[[:digit:]]{4}[-]$"))
yend_clean <- unlist(str_extract_all(yend_clean, "^[[:digit:]]{4}"))
Assumes that you have a string, "1993–2007, 2010-", and you want to get the last given year, which is "2010". The first line, which means four digits and a dash and end, return "2010-", and the second line return "2010".
I have a bunch of strings that contain the word "radius" followed by one or two digits. They also contain a lot of other letters, digits, and underscores. For example, one is "inflow100_radius6_distance12". I want a regex that will just return the one or two digits following "radius." If R recognized \K, then I would just use this:
radius\K[0-9]{1,2}
and be done. But R doesn't allow \K, so I ended up with this instead (which selects radius and the following numbers, and then cuts off "radius"):
result <- regmatches(input_string, gregexpr("radius[0-9]{1,2}", input_string))
result <- unlist(substr(result, 7, 8)))
I'm pretty new to regex, so I'm sure there's a better way. Any ideas?
\K is recognized. You can solve the problem by turning on the perl = TRUE parameter.
result <- regmatches(x, gregexpr('radius\\K\\d+', x, perl=T))
1) Match the entire string replacing it with the digits after radius:
sub(".*radius(\\d+).*", "\\1", "inflow100_radius6_distance12")
## [1] "6"
The regular expression can be visualized as follows:
.*radius(\d+).*
Debuggex Demo
2) This also works, involves a simpler regular expression and converts it to numeric at the same time:
library(gsubfn)
strapply("inflow100_radius6_distance12", "radius(\\d+)", as.numeric, simplify = TRUE)
## [1] 6
Here is a visualization of the regular expression:
radius(\d+)
Debuggex Demo
I'm wanting to build a regex expression substituting in some strings to search for, and so these string need to be escaped before I can put them in the regex, so that if the searched for string contains regex characters it still works.
Some languages have functions that will do this for you (e.g. python re.escape: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10013356/1900520). Does R have such a function?
For example (made up function):
x = "foo[bar]"
y = escape(x) # y should now be "foo\\[bar\\]"
I've written an R version of Perl's quotemeta function:
library(stringr)
quotemeta <- function(string) {
str_replace_all(string, "(\\W)", "\\\\\\1")
}
I always use the perl flavor of regexps, so this works for me. I don't know whether it works for the "normal" regexps in R.
Edit: I found the source explaining why this works. It's in the Quoting Metacharacters section of the perlre manpage:
This was once used in a common idiom to disable or quote the special meanings of regular expression metacharacters in a string that you want to use for a pattern. Simply quote all non-"word" characters:
$pattern =~ s/(\W)/\\$1/g;
As you can see, the R code above is a direct translation of this same substitution (after a trip through backslash hell). The manpage also says (emphasis mine):
Unlike some other regular expression languages, there are no backslashed symbols that aren't alphanumeric.
which reinforces my point that this solution is only guaranteed for PCRE.
Apparently there is a function called escapeRegex in the Hmisc package. The function itself has the following definition for an input value of 'string':
gsub("([.|()\\^{}+$*?]|\\[|\\])", "\\\\\\1", string)
My previous answer:
I'm not sure if there is a built in function but you could make one to do what you want. This basically just creates a vector of the values you want to replace and a vector of what you want to replace them with and then loops through those making the necessary replacements.
re.escape <- function(strings){
vals <- c("\\\\", "\\[", "\\]", "\\(", "\\)",
"\\{", "\\}", "\\^", "\\$","\\*",
"\\+", "\\?", "\\.", "\\|")
replace.vals <- paste0("\\\\", vals)
for(i in seq_along(vals)){
strings <- gsub(vals[i], replace.vals[i], strings)
}
strings
}
Some output
> test.strings <- c("What the $^&(){}.*|?", "foo[bar]")
> re.escape(test.strings)
[1] "What the \\$\\^&\\(\\)\\{\\}\\.\\*\\|\\?"
[2] "foo\\[bar\\]"
An easier way than #ryanthompson function is to simply prepend \\Q and postfix \\E to your string. See the help file ?base::regex.
Use the rex package
These days, I write all my regular expressions using rex. For your specific example, rex does exactly what you want:
library(rex)
library(assertthat)
x = "foo[bar]"
y = rex(x)
assert_that(y == "foo\\[bar\\]")
But of course, rex does a lot more than that. The question mentions building a regex, and that's exactly what rex is designed for. For example, suppose we wanted to match the exact string in x, with nothing before or after:
x = "foo[bar]"
y = rex(start, x, end)
Now y is ^foo\[bar\]$ and will only match the exact string contained in x.
According to ?regex:
The symbol \w matches a ‘word’ character (a synonym for [[:alnum:]_], an extension) and \W is its negation ([^[:alnum:]_]).
Therefore, using capture groups, (\\W), we can detect the occurrences of non-word characters and escape it with the \\1-syntax:
> gsub("(\\W)", "\\\\\\1", "[](){}.|^+$*?\\These are words")
[1] "\\[\\]\\(\\)\\{\\}\\.\\|\\^\\+\\$\\*\\?\\\\These\\ are\\ words"
Or similarly, replacing "([^[:alnum:]_])" for "(\\W)".