How to extract words with exactly one vowel - r

Question

I have strings like these:
turns <- c("does him good to stir him up now and again .",
"when , when I see him he w's on the settees .",
"yes it 's been eery for a long time .",
"blissful timing , indeed it was ")
What I'm trying to do is extract those words that have exactly one vowel. I do get the correct result with this:
library(stringr)
str_extract_all(turns, "\\b[b-df-hj-np-tv-z]*[aeiou][b-df-hj-np-tv-z]*\\b")
[[1]]
[1] "him" "to" "stir" "him" "up" "now" "and"
[[2]]
[1] "when" "when" "i" "him" "he" "on" "the"
[[3]]
[1] "yes" "it" "for" "a" "long"
[[4]]
[1] "it" "was"
However, it feels cumbersome to define a consonant class. Is there a more elegant and more concise way?

Answer 1

We can use str_count on the words after splitting the 'turns' at the spaces
library(stringr)
lapply(strsplit(turns, "\\s+"), function(x) x[str_count(x, '[aeiou]') == 1])
-output
#[[1]]
#[1] "him" "to" "stir" "him" "up" "now" "and"
#[[2]]
#[1] "when" "when" "him" "he" "on" "the"
#[[3]]
#[1] "yes" "it" "for" "a" "long"
#[[4]]
#[1] "it" "was"

Answer 2

You can use a PCRE regex with character classes containing double negation:
turns <- c("does him good to stir him up now and again .",
"when , when I see him he w's on the settees .",
"yes it 's been eery for a long time .",
"blissful timing , indeed it was ")
rx <- "\\b[^[:^alpha:]aeiou]*[aeiou][^[:^alpha:]aeiou]*\\b"
regmatches(turns, gregexpr(rx, turns, perl=TRUE, ignore.case=TRUE))
See the R demo online. The result is as in the question.
See the regex demo. Details:
\b - word boundary
[^[:^alpha:]aeiou]* - zero or more chars other than letters and aeiou chars
[aeiou] - a vowel
[^[:^alpha:]aeiou]* - zero or more chars other than letters and aeiou chars
\b - word boundary.
An equivalent expression:
(?i)\b[^\P{L}aeiou]*[aeiou][^\P{L}aeiou]*\b
See this regex demo. \P{L} matches any char but a letter. (?i) is equivalent of ignore.case=TRUE.

Answer 3

Here is a base R option using strsplit + nchar + gsub
lapply(
strsplit(turns, "\\s"),
function(v) v[nchar(gsub("[^aeiou]", "", v)) == 1]
)
which gives
[[1]]
[1] "him" "to" "stir" "him" "up" "now" "and"
[[2]]
[1] "when" "when" "him" "he" "on" "the"
[[3]]
[1] "yes" "it" "for" "a" "long"
[[4]]
[1] "it" "was"