R Regex for matching comma separated sections in a column/vector - r

Question

The original Title for this Question was : R Regex for word boundary excluding space.It reflected the manner I was approaching the problem in. However, this is a better solution to my particular problem. It should work as long as a particular delimiter is used to separate items within a 'cell'
This must be very simple, but I've hit a brick wall on it.
I have a dataframe column where each cell(row) is a comma separated list of items. I want to find the rows that have a specific item.
df<-data.frame( nms= c("XXXCAP,XXX CAPITAL LIMITED" , "XXX,XXX POLYMERS LIMITED, 3455" , "YYY,XXX REP LIMITED,999,XXX" ),
b = c('A', 'X', "T"))
nms b
1 XXXCAP,XXX CAPITAL LIMITED A
2 XXX,XXX POLYMERS LIMITED, 3455 X
3 YYY,XXX REP LIMITED,999,XXX T
I want to search for rows that have item XXX. Rows 2 and 3 should match. Row 1 has the string XXX as part of a larger string and obviously should not match.
However, because XXX in row 1 is separated by spaces in each side, I am having trouble filtering it out with \\b or [[:<:]]
grep("\\bXXX\\b",df$nms, value = F) #matches 1,2,3
The easiest way to do this of course is strsplit() but I'd like to avoid it.Any suggestions on performance are welcome.

Answer 1

When \b does not "work", the problem usually lies in the definition of the "whole word".
A word boundary can occur in one of three positions:
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.
It seems you want to only match a word in between commas or start/end of the string).
You may use a PCRE regex (note the perl=TRUE argument) like
(?<![^,])XXX(?![^,])
See the regex demo (the expression is "converted" to use positive lookarounds due to the fact it is a demo with a single multiline string).
Details
(?<![^,]) (equal to (?<=^|,)) - either start of the string or a comma
XXX - an XXX word
(?![^,]) (equal to (?=$|,)) - either end of the string or a comma
R demo:
> grep("(?<![^,])XXX(?![^,])",df$nms, value = FALSE, perl=TRUE)
## => [1] 2 3
The equivalent TRE regex will look like
> grep("(?:^|,)XXX(?:$|,)",df$nms, value = FALSE)
Note that here, non-capturing groups are used to match either start of string or , (see (?:^|,)) and either end of string or , (see ((?:$|,))).

Answer 2

This is perhaps a somewhat simplistic solution, but it works for the examples which you've provided:
library(stringr)
df$nms %>%
str_replace_all('\\s', '') %>% # Removes all spaces, tabs, newlines, etc
str_detect('(^|,)XXX(,|$)') # Detects string XXX surrounded by comma or beginning/end
[1] FALSE TRUE TRUE
Also, have a look at this cheatsheet made by RStudio on Regular Expressions - it is very nicely made and very useful (I keep going back to it when I'm in doubt).