Remove Everything Except Specific Words From Text - r

I'm working with twitter data using R. I have a large data frame where I need to remove everything from the text except from specific information. Specifically, I want to remove everything except from statistical information. So basically, I want to keep numbers as well as words such as "half", "quarter", "third". Also is there a way to also keep symbols such as "£", "%", "$"?
I have been using "gsub" to try and do this:
df$text <- as.numeric(gsub(".*?([0-9]+).*", "\\1", df$text))
This code removes everything except from numbers, however information regarding any words was gone. I'm struggling to figure out how I would be able to keep specific words within the text as well as the numbers.
Here's a mock data frame:
text <- c("here is some text with stuff inside that i dont need but also some that i do, here is a word half and quarter also 99 is too old for lego", "heres another one with numbers 132 1244 5950 303 2022 and one and a half", "plz help me with code i am struggling")
df <- data.frame(text)
I would like to be be able to end up with data frame outputting:
Also, I've included a N/A table in the picture because some of my observations will have neither a number or the specific words. The goal of this code is really just to be able to say that these observations contain some form of statistical language and these other observations do not.
Any help would be massively appreciate and I'll do my best to answer any Q's!

I am sure there is a more elegant solution, but I believe this will accomplish what you want!
df$newstrings <- unlist(lapply(regmatches(df$text, gregexpr("half|quarter|third|[[:digit:]]+", df$text)), function(x) paste(x, collapse = "")))
df$newstrings[df$newstrings == ""] <- NA
> df$newstrings
# [1] "halfquarter99" "132124459503032022half" NA

You can capture what you need to keep and then match and consume any character to replace with a backreference to the group value:
text <- c("here is some text with stuff inside that i dont need but also some that i do, here is a word half and quarter also 99 is too old for lego", "heres another one with numbers 132 1244 5950 303 2022 and one and a half", "plz help me with code i am struggling")
gsub("(half|quarter|third|\\d+)|.", "\\1", text)
See the regex demo. Details:
(half|quarter|third|\d+) - a half, quarter or third word, or one or more digits
| - or
. - any single char.
The \1 in the replacement pattern puts the captured vaue back into the resulting string.
Output:
[1] "halfquarter99" "132124459503032022half" ""

Related

How to filter R dataset by multiple partial match strings, similar to SQL % wildcard? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
What's the R equivalent of SQL's LIKE 'description%' statement?
(4 answers)
Closed 11 days ago.
I have a dataset with with a field of interest and a list of strings (several hundred of them).
What I want to do is, for each line of the data, to check if the field has any of the partials strings in it.
Essentially, I want to replicate the SQL % wildcard. So, if for example a value is "Game123" and one of my strings is "Ga" I want that to be a match. (But I don't want "OGame" to match "Ga").
I'm hoping to write some statement like this:
df%>%
filter(My_Field contains any one of List_Of_Strings)
How do I fill in that filter statement?
I tried to use the %in% operator but couldn't make it work. I know how to use substrings to check against a single string, but I have a long list of them and need to check all of them.
R filter rows based on multiple partial strings applied to multiple columns: This post is similar to what I'm trying to do, but my list of substrings is 400 plus, so I can't write it all out manually in a grepl statement (I think?)
Since there is no particular dataset or reproductible example, I can think of a way to implement it with two apply functions and a smart use of regex. Remember that the regex operator ^ matches only if the following expression shows up in its beginning.
library(dplyr)
MyField <- c("OGame","Game123","Duck","Dugame","Aldubame")
df <- data.frame(MyField)
ListOfStrings <- c("^Ga","^Du") #Notice the use of ^ here
match_s <- function(patterns,entry){
lapply(patterns,grepl,x = entry) %>% unlist() %>% any()
}
df$match_string <- lapply(df$MyField, match_s, pat = ListOfStrings)
df %>% filter(match_string == 1)
With dplyr (using stringr for words and sentences as examples) and grepl in conjunction with \\b to get the word boundary match at the beginning.
library(stringr)
library(dplyr)
set.seed(22)
tibble(sentences) %>%
rowwise() %>%
filter(any(sapply(words[sample(length(words), 10)], function(x)
grepl(paste0("\\b", x), sentences)))) %>%
ungroup()
# A tibble: 32 × 1
sentences
<chr>
1 It's easy to tell the depth of a well.
2 Kick the ball straight and follow through.
3 A king ruled the state in the early days.
4 March the soldiers past the next hill.
5 The dune rose from the edge of the water.
6 The grass curled around the fence post.
7 Cats and Dogs each hate the other.
8 The harder he tried the less he got done.
9 He knew the skill of the great young actress.
10 The club rented the rink for the fifth night.
# … with 22 more rows
I guess the problem you're facing is this:
You have a list of what could be called key words (what you call "a list of strings") and a vector/column with text (what you call "a field of interest") and your goal is to filter the vector/column on whether or not any of the key words is present. If that's correct the solution might be this:
Data:
a. List of key words:
keys <- c("how", "why", "what")
b. Dataframe with a vector/column of text:
df <- data.frame(
text = c("Hi there", "How are you?", "I'm fine.", "So how's work?", "Ah kinda stressful.", "Why?", "Well you know")
)
Solution:
To filter df on keys in text you need to convert keys into a regex alternation pattern (by collapsing the strings with |). Depending on your keys it may be useful or even necessary to also include word \\boundary markers (in case the keys values need to match as such, but not occurring inside other words). And finally, if there may be an issue with lower- or upper-case, we can use the case-insensitive flag (?i):
df %>%
filter(str_detect(text, str_c("(?i)\\b(", str_c(keys, collapse = "|"), ")\\b")))
text
1 How are you?
2 So how's work?
3 Why?

Filter rows based on dynamic pattern

I have speech data in in a dataframe dfin column Orthographic:
df <- data.frame(
Orthographic = c("this is it at least probably",
"well not probably it's not intuitive",
"sure no it's I mean it's very intuitive",
"I don't mean to be rude but it's anything but you know",
"well okay maybe"),
Repeat = c(NA, "probably", "it's,intuitive", "I,mean,it's", NA),
Repeat_pattern = c(NA, "\\b(probably)\\b", "\\b(it's|intuitive)\\b", "\\b(I,mean|it's)\\b",
NA))
I want to filter rows based on a dynamic pattern, namely the occurrence of no, never, not as words OR n't before any of the words listed in column Repeat. However, using the pattern \\b(no|never|not)\\b|n't\\b\\s together with the alternation patterns in column Repeat_pattern, I get this error:
df %>%
filter(grepl(paste0("\\b(no|never|not)\\b|n't\\b\\s", Repeat_pattern), Orthographic))
Orthographic Repeat Repeat_pattern
1 well not probably it's not intuitive probably \\b(probably)\\b
2 sure no it's I mean it's very intuitive it's,intuitive \\b(it's|intuitive)\\b
Warning message:
In grepl(paste0("\\b(no|never|not)\\b|n't\\b\\s", Repeat_pattern), :
argument 'pattern' has length > 1 and only the first element will be used
I don't know why "only the first element will be used" as the two pattern components seem to connect well:
paste0("\\b(no|never|not)\\b|n't\\b\\s", df$Repeat_pattern)
[1] "\\b(no|never|not)\\b|n't\\b\\sNA" "\\b(no|never|not)\\b|n't\\b\\s\\b(probably)\\b"
[3] "\\b(no|never|not)\\b|n't\\b\\s\\b(it's|intuitive)\\b" "\\b(no|never|not)\\b|n't\\b\\s\\b(I,mean|it's)\\b"
[5] "\\b(no|never|not)\\b|n't\\b\\sNA"
The expected output is this:
2 well not probably it's not intuitive probably \\b(probably)\\b
3 sure no it's I mean it's very intuitive it's,intuitive \\b(it's|intuitive)\\b
4 I don't mean to be rude but it's anything but you know I,mean,it's \\b(I,mean|it's)\\b
It looks like a vectorization issue here, you need to use stringr::str_detect here rather than grepl.
Also, you did not group the negative word alternatives well, all of them must reside in a single group and your n't is now obligatory in a string.
Alse, NA values are coerced to text and added to the regex patterns, while it seems you want to discard the items where Repeat_pattern is NA.
You can fix your code by using
df %>%
filter(ifelse(is.na(Repeat_pattern), FALSE, str_detect(Orthographic, paste0("(?:\\bno|\\bnever|\\bnot|n't)\\b.*", Repeat_pattern))))
Output:
Orthographic Repeat Repeat_pattern
1 well not probably it's not intuitive probably \\b(probably)\\b
2 sure no it's I mean it's very intuitive it's,intuitive \\b(it's|intuitive)\\b
3 I don't mean to be rude but it's anything but you know I,mean,it's \\b(I|mean|it's)\\b
I also think the last pattern must be \\b(I|mean|it's)\\b, not \\b(I,mean|it's)\\b.
If there can only be whitespace between the "no" words and the word from Repeat column, replace .* with \\s+ in my pattern. I used .*\b to make sure there is a match anywhere to the right of the "no" words.

Extract larger body of character data with stringr?

I am working to scrape text data from around 1000 pdf files. I have managed to import them all into R-studio, used str_subset and str_extract_all to acquire the smaller attributes I need. The main goal of this project is to scrape case history narrative data. These are paragraphs of natural language, bounded by unique words that are standardized throughout all the individual documents. See below for a reproduced example.
Is there a way I can use those two unique words, ("CASE HISTORY & INVESTIGATOR:"), to bound the text I would like to extract? If not, what sort of approach can I take to extracting the narrative data I need from each report?
text_data <- list("ES SPRINGFEILD POLICE DE FARRELL #789\n NOTIFIED DATE TIME OFFICER\nMARITAL STATUS: UNKNOWN\nIDENTIFIED BY: H. POIROT AT: SCENE DATE: 01/02/1895\nFINGERPRINTS TAKEN BY DATE\n YES NO OBIWAN KENOBI 01/02/1895\n
SPRINGFEILD\n CASE#: 012-345-678\n ABC NOTIFIED: ABC DATE:\n ABC OFFICER: NATURE:\nCASE HISTORY\n This is a string. There are many strings like it, but this one is mine. To be more specific, this is string 456 out of 5000 strings. It’s a case narrative string and\n Case#: 012-345-678\n EXAMINER / INVESTIGATOR'S REPORT\n CITY AND COUNTY OF SPRINGFEILD - RECORD OF CASE\nit continues on another page. It’s 1 page but mostly but often more than 1, 2 even\n the next capitalized word, investigator with a colon, is a unique word where the string stops.\nINVESTIGATOR: HERCULE POIROT \n")
Here is what the expected output would be.
output <- list("This is a string. There are many strings like it, but this one is mine. To be more specific, this is string 456 out of 5000 strings. It’s a case narrative string and\n Case#: 012-345-678\n EXAMINER / INVESTIGATOR'S REPORT\n CITY AND COUNTY OF SPRINGFEILD - RECORD OF CASE\nit continues on another page. It’s 1 page but mostly but often more than 1, 2 even\n the next capitalized word, investigator with a colon, is a unique word where the string stops.")
Thanks so much for helping!
One quick approach would be to use gsub and regexes to replace everything up to and including CASE HISTORY ('^.*CASE HISTORY') and everything after INVESTIGATOR: ('INVESTIGATOR:.*') with nothing. What remains will be the text between those two matches.
gsub('INVESTIGATOR:.*', '', gsub('^.*CASE HISTORY', '', text_data))
[1] "\n This is a string. There are many strings like it, but this one is mine. To be more specific, this is string 456 out of 5000 strings. It’s a case narrative string and\n Case#: 012-345-678\n EXAMINER / INVESTIGATOR'S REPORT\n CITY AND COUNTY OF SPRINGFEILD - RECORD OF CASE\nit continues on another page. It’s 1 page but mostly but often more than 1, 2 even\n the next capitalized word, investigator with a colon, is a unique word where the string stops.\n"
After much deliberation I came to a solution I feel is worth sharing, so here we go:
# unlist text_data
file_contents_unlist <-
paste(unlist(text_data), collapse = " ")
# read lines, squish for good measure.
file_contents_lines <-
file_contents_unlist%>%
readr::read_lines() %>%
str_squish()
# Create indicies in the lines of our text data based upon regex grepl
# functions, be sure they match if scraping multiple chunks of data..
index_case_num_1 <- which(grepl("(Case#: \\d+[-]\\d+)",
file_contents_lines))
index_case_num_2 <- which(grepl("(Case#: \\d+[-]\\d+)",
file_contents_lines))
# function basically states, "give me back whatever's in those indices".
pull_case_num <-
function(index_case_num_1, index_case_num_2){
(file_contents_lines[index_case_num_1:index_case_num_2]
)
}
# map2() to iterate.
case_nums <- map2(index_case_num_1,
index_case_num_2,
pull_case_num)
# transform to dataframe
case_nums_df <- as.data.frame.character(case_nums)
# Repeat pattern for other vectors as needed.
index_case_hist_1 <-
which(grepl("CASE HISTORY", file_contents_lines))
index_case_hist_2 <-
which(grepl("Case#: ", file_contents_lines))
pull_case_hist <- function(index_case_hist_1,
index_case_hist_2 )
{(file_contents_lines[index_case_hist_1:index_case_hist_2]
)
}
case_hist <- map2(index_case_hist_1,
index_case_hist_2,
pull_case_hist)
case_hist_df <- as.data.frame.character(case_hist)
# cbind() the vectors, also a good call place to debug from.
cases_comp <- cbind(case_nums_df, case_hist_df)
Thanks all for responding. I hope this solution helps someone out there in the future. :)

Trying to convert .txt into Excel using R, issues with irregular spacing as "delimiter"

I'm a fairly basic user and I'm having issues uploading a .txt file in a neat manner to get a Excel-like table output using R.
My main issue stems from the fact that the "columns" in the .txt file are created by using a varying amount of spaces. So for example (periods representing spaces, imagining that the info lines up together):
Mister B Smith....Age 35.....Brooklyn
Mrs Smith.........Age 33.....Brooklyn
Child Smith.......Age 8......Brooklyn
Other Child Smith.Age 1......Brooklyn
Grandma Smith.....Age 829....Brooklyn
And there are hundreds of thousands of these rows, all with different spaces that line up to make "columns." Any idea on how I should go about inputting the data?
It appears as your your file is not delimited at all, but in a fixed width format. You focused on the number of spaces when really it seems like the data have varying number of characters in fields of the same fixed width. You'll need to verify this. But the first "column" seems to be exactly 19 characters long. Then comes the string Age (with a space at the end) and then a 7 character column with the age. Then a final column and it's not clear at all how long it might be.
Of course this could be me overfitting to this small snippet. Check if I have guessed correctly. If I have, you can use the base function read.fwf for files like this. Let's say the file name is foo.txt and you want to call the result my_foo. The Age column is redundant, so let's skip it. And let's say the final column actually has 8 characters (the number of characters in Brooklyn but you'll need to check this)
my_foo <- read.fwf("foo.txt", c(19, -4, 7, 8))
might get you what you want. See ?read.fwf for details.
If the deliminator is always a number of spaces you can read in your .txt file and split each line into a vector using a regex that looks for more than one space:
x <- c("Mister B Smith Age 35 Brooklyn",
"Mrs Smith Age 33 Brooklyn")
stringr::str_split(x, " {2,}")
[[1]]
[1] "Mister B Smith" "Age 35" "Brooklyn"
[[2]]
[1] "Mrs Smith" "Age 33" "Brooklyn"
The only problem you might run into with this approach is if, due to the length of one field, there is only one space between fields (for example: "Mister B Smithees Age 35 Brooklyn"). In this case, #ngm's approach is the only possible option.

Gathering the correct amount of digits for numbers when text mining

I need to search for specific information within a set of documents that follows the same standard layout.
After I used grep to find the keywords in every document, I went on collecting the numbers or characters of interest.
One piece of data I have to collect is the Total Power that appears as following:
TotalPower: 986559. (UoPow)
Since I had already correctly selected this excerpt, I created the following function that takes the characters between positions n and m, where n and m start counting up from right to left.
substrRight <- function(x, n,m){
substr(x, nchar(x)-n+1, nchar(x)-m)
}
It's important to say that from the ":" to the number 986559, there are 2 spaces; and from the "." to the "(", there's one space.
So I wrote:
TotalP = substrRight(myDf[i],17,9) [1]
where myDf is a character vector with all the relevant observations.
Line [1], after I loop over all my observations, gives me the numbers I want, but I noticed that when the number was 986559, the result was 98655. It simply doesn't "see" 9 as the last number.
The code seems to work fine for the rest of the data. This number (986559) is indeed the highest number in the data and is the only one with order 10^5 of magnitude.
How can I make sure that I will gather all digits in every number?
Thank you for the help.
We can extract the digits before a . by using regex lookaround
library(stringr)
str_extract(str1, "\\d+(?=\\.)")
#[1] "986559"
The \\d+ indicates one or more digist followed by the regex lookaound .

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