Assume I have text and I want to extract exact matches. How can I do this efficiently:
test_text <- c("[]", "[1234]", "[1234a]", "[v1256a] ghjk kjh",
"[othername1256b] kjhgfd hgj",
"[v1256] ghjk kjh", "[v1256] kjhgfd hgj",
" text here [name1991] and here",
"[name1990] this is an explanation",
"[name1991] this is another explanation",
"[mäölk1234]")
expected <- c("[v1256a]", "[othername1256b]", "[v1256]", "[v1256]", "[name1991]",
"[name1990]", "[name1991]", "[mäölk1234]")
# This works:
regmatches(text, regexpr("\\[.*[0-9]{4}.*\\]", text))
But I guess something like "\\[.*[0-9]{4}(?[a-z])]\\]" would be better but it throws an error
Error in regexpr("\[.[0-9]{4}(?[a-z])]\]", text) : invalid
regular expression '[.[0-9]{4}(?[a-z])]]', reason 'Invalid regexp'
Only ONE letter should follow the year, but there can be none, see example. Sorry, I rarly use regexpr...
Updated question solution
It seems you want to extract all occurrences of 1+ letters followed with 4 digits and then an optional letter inside square brackets.
Use
test_text <- c("[]", "[1234]", "[1234a]", "[v1256a] ghjk kjh",
"[othername1256b] kjhgfd hgj",
"[v1256] ghjk kjh", "[v1256] kjhgfd hgj",
" text here [name1991] and here",
"[name1990] this is an explanation",
"[name1991] this is another explanation",
"[mäölk1234]")
regmatches(test_text, regexpr("\\[\\p{L}+[0-9]{4}\\p{L}?]", test_text, perl=TRUE))
# => c("[v1256a]", "[othername1256b]", "[v1256]", "[v1256]", "[name1991]",
# "[name1990]", "[name1991]", "[mäölk1234]")
See the R demo online. NOTE that you need to use a PCRE regex for this to work, perl=TRUE is crucial here.
Details
\[ - a [ char
\p{L}+ - 1+ any Unicode letters
[0-9]{4} - four ASCII digits
\\p{L}? - an optional any Unicode letter
] - a ] char.
Original answer
Use
regmatches(test_text, regexpr("\\[[^][]*[0-9]{4}[[:alpha:]]?]", test_text))
Or
regmatches(test_text, regexpr("\\[[^][]*[0-9]{4}[a-zA-Z]?]", test_text))
See the regex demo and a Regulex graph:
Details
\[ - a [ char
[^][]* - 0 or more chars other than [ and ] (HINT: if you only expect letters here replace with [[:alpha:]]* or [a-zA-Z]*)
[0-9]{4} - four digits
[[:alpha:]]? - an optional letter (or [a-zA-Z]? will match any ASCII optional letter)
] - a ] char
R test:
regmatches(test_text, regexpr("\\[[^][]*[0-9]{4}[[:alpha:]]?]", test_text))
## => [1] "[v1256a]" "[othername1256b]" "[v1256]" "[v1256]" "[name1991]" "[name1990]" "[name1991]"
Related
I have seen in manuals how to use grep to match either a pattern or an exact string. However, I cannot figure out how to do both at the same time. I have a latex file where I want to find the following pattern:
\caption[SOME WORDS]
and replace it with:
\caption[\textit{SOME WORDS}]
I have tried with:
texfile <- sub('\\caption[','\\caption[\\textit ', texfile, fixed=TRUE)
but I do not know how to tell grep that there should be some text after the square bracket, and then a closed square bracket.
You can use
texfile <- "\\caption[SOME WORDS]" ## -> \caption[\textit{SOME WORDS}]
texfile <-gsub('(\\\\caption\\[)([^][]*)]','\\1\\\\textit{\\2}]', texfile)
cat(texfile)
## -> \caption[\textit{SOME WORDS}]
See the R demo online.
Details:
(\\caption\[) - Group 1 (\1 in the replacement pattern): a \caption[ string
([^][]*) - Group 2 (\2 in the replacement pattern): any zero or more chars other than [ and ]
] - a ] char.
Another solution based on a PCRE regex:
gsub('\\Q\\caption[\\E\\K([^][]*)]','\\\\textit{\\1}]', texfile, perl=TRUE)
See this R demo online. Details:
\Q - start "quoting", i.e. treating the patterns to the right as literal text
\caption[ - a literal fixed string
\E - stop quoting the pattern
\K - omit text matched so far
([^][]*) - Group 1 (\1): any zero or more non-bracket chars
] - a ] char.
I want to match every cases of "-", but not these ones:
[\d]-[A-Z]
[A-Z]-[\d]
I tried this pattern: ((?<![A-Z])-(?![0-9]))|((?<![0-9])-(?![A-Z])) but some results are incorrect like: "RUA VF-32 N"
Can anyone help me?
A simple approach is to use grep with your current logic and inverting the result, and then run another grep to only keep those items that have a hyphen in them:
x <- c("QUADRA 120 - ASA BRANCA","FAZENDA LAGE -RODOVIA RIO VERDE","C-15","99-B","A-A")
grep("-", grep("[A-Z]-\\d|\\d-[A-Z]", x, invert=TRUE, value=TRUE), value=TRUE, fixed=TRUE)
# => [1] "QUADRA 120 - ASA BRANCA" "FAZENDA LAGE -RODOVIA RIO VERDE"
# [3] "A-A"
Here, [A-Z]-\\d|\\d-[A-Z] matches a hyphen either in between an uppercase ASCII etter or a digit or betweena digit and an ASCII uppercase letter. If there is a match, the result is inverted due to invert=TRUE.
See the R demo.
To only match - in all contexts other than in between a letter and a digit, you may use the PCRE regex based on SKIP-FAIL technique like
> grep("(?:\\d-[A-Z]|[A-Z]-\\d)(*SKIP)(*F)|-", x, perl=TRUE)
[1] 1 2
See this regex demo
Details
(?:\d-[A-Z]|[A-Z]-\d) - a non-capturing group that matches either a digit, - and then uppercase ASCII letter, or an uppercase ASCII letter, - and a digit
(*SKIP)(*F) - omit the current match and proceed looking for the next match at the end of the "failed" match
| - or
- - a hyphen.
For a text field, I would like to expose those that contain invalid characters. The list of invalid characters is unknown; I only know the list of accepted ones.
For example for French language, the accepted list is
A-z, 1-9, [punc::], space, àéèçè, hyphen, etc.
The list of invalid charactersis unknown, yet I want anything unusual to resurface, for example, I would want
This is an 2-piece à-la-carte dessert to pass when
'Ã this Øs an apple' pumps up as an anomalie
The 'not contain' notion in R does not behave as I would like, for example
grep("[^(abc)]",c("abcdef", "defabc", "apple") )
(those that does not contain 'abc') match all three while
grep("(abc)",c("abcdef", "defabc", "apple") )
behaves correctly and match only the first two. Am I missing something
How can we do that in R ? Also, how can we put hypen together in the list of accepted characters ?
[a-z1-9[:punct:] àâæçéèêëîïôœùûüÿ-]+
The above regex matches any of the following (one or more times). Note that the parameter ignore.case=T used in the code below allows the following to also match uppercase variants of the letters.
a-z Any lowercase ASCII letter
1-9 Any digit in the range from 1 to 9 (excludes 0)
[:punct:] Any punctuation character
The space character
àâæçéèêëîïôœùûüÿ Any valid French character with a diacritic mark
- The hyphen character
See code in use here
x <- c("This is an 2-piece à-la-carte dessert", "Ã this Øs an apple")
gsub("[a-z1-9[:punct:] àâæçéèêëîïôœùûüÿ-]+", "", x, ignore.case=T)
The code above replaces all valid characters with nothing. The result is all invalid characters that exist in the string. The following is the output:
[1] "" "ÃØ"
If by "expose the invalid characters" you mean delete the "accepted" ones, then a regex character class should be helpful. From the ?regex help page we can see that a hyphen is already part of the punctuation character vector;
[:punct:]
Punctuation characters:
! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? # [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~
So the code could be:
x <- 'Ã this Øs an apple'
gsub("[A-z1-9[:punct:] àéèçè]+", "", x)
#[1] "ÃØ"
Note that regex has a predefined, locale-specific "[:alpha:]" named character class that would probably be both safer and more compact than the expression "[A-zàéèçè]" especially since the post from ctwheels suggests that you missed a few. The ?regex page indicates that "[0-9A-Za-z]" might be both locale- and encoding-specific.
If by "expose" you instead meant "identify the postion within the string" then you could use the negation operator "^" within the character class formalism and apply gregexpr:
gregexpr("[^A-z1-9[:punct:] àéèçè]+", x)
[[1]]
[1] 1 8
attr(,"match.length")
[1] 1 1
Say I have a dataframe df in which a column df$strings contains strings like
[cat 00.04;09]
[cat 00.04;10]
and so on. I want to remove all characters between "[cat" and "]" to yield
[cat]
[cat]
I've tried this using gsub but it's not working and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong:
gsub('cat*?\\]', '', df)
Note that cat*?\\] patten matches ca, then any 0+ t chars but as few as possible and then ].
You want to match any chars other than ] between [cat and ]:
gsub('\\[cat[^]]*\\]', '[cat]', df$strings)
Here,
\\[ - matches [
cat - matches cat
[^]]* - 0+ chars other than ] (note that ] inside the bracket expression should not be escaped when placed at the start - else, if you escape it, you will need to add perl=TRUE argument since PCRE regex engine can handle regex escapes inside bracket expressions (not the default TRE))
\\] - a ] (you do not even need to escape it, you may just use ]).
See the R demo:
x <- c("[cat 00.04;09]", "[cat 00.04;10]")
gsub('\\[cat[^]]*\\]', '[cat]', x)
## => [1] "[cat]" "[cat]"
If cat can be any word, use
gsub('\\[(\\w+)[^]]*\\]', '[\\1]', x)
where (\\w+) is a capturing group with ID=1 that matches 1 or more word chars, and \\1 in the replacement pattern is a replacement backreference that stands for the group value.
Using stringr i tried to detect a € sign at the end of a string as follows:
str_detect("my text €", "€\\b") # FALSE
Why is this not working? It is working in the following cases:
str_detect("my text a", "a\\b") # TRUE - letter instead of €
grepl("€\\b", "2009in €") # TRUE - base R solution
But it also fails in perl mode:
grepl("€\\b", "2009in €", perl=TRUE) # FALSE
So what is wrong about the €\\b-regex? The regex €$ is working in all cases...
When you use base R regex functions without perl=TRUE, TRE regex flavor is used.
It appears that TRE word boundary:
When used after a non-word character matches the end of string position, and
When used before a non-word character matches the start of string position.
See the R tests:
> gsub("\\b\\)", "HERE", ") 2009in )")
[1] "HERE 2009in )"
> gsub("\\)\\b", "HERE", ") 2009in )")
[1] ") 2009in HERE"
>
This is not a common behavior of a word boundary in PCRE and ICU regex flavors where a word boundary before a non-word character only matches when the character is preceded with a word char, excluding the start of string position (and when used after a non-word character requires a word character to appear right after the word boundary):
There are three different positions that qualify as word boundaries:
- Before the first character in the string, if the first character is a word character.
- After the last character in the string, if the last character is a word character.
- Between two characters in the string, where one is a word character and the other is not a word character.
\b
is equivalent to
(?:(?<!\w)(?=\w)|(?<=\w)(?!\w))
which is to say it matches
between a word char and a non-word char,
between a word char and the start of the string, and
between a word char and the end of the string.
€ is a symbol, and symbols aren't word characters.
$ uniprops €
U+20AC <€> \N{EURO SIGN}
\pS \p{Sc}
All Any Assigned Common Zyyy Currency_Symbol Sc Currency_Symbols S Gr_Base Grapheme_Base Graph X_POSIX_Graph GrBase Print X_POSIX_Print Symbol Unicode
If your language supports look-behinds and look-aheads, you could use the following to find a boundary between a space and non-space (treating the start and end as a space).
(?:(?<!\S)(?=\S)|(?<=\S)(?!\S))