Counting the frequency of differing patterns in a character string - r

Question

I currently have a string in R that looks like this:
a <- "BMMBMMMMBMMMBMMBBMMM"
First, I need to determine the frequency of different patterns of "M" that appear in the string.
In this example it would be:
MM = 2
MMM = 2
MMMM = 1
Secondly, I then need to designate a numerical value/score for each different pattern.
i.e:
MM = 1
MMM = 2
MMMM = 3
This would mean that the total value/score of M's in a would equal 9.
If anyone knows any script that would allow me to do this for multiple strings like this in a dataframe that would be great?
Thank you.

Answer 1

a <- "BMMBMMMMBMMMBMMBBMMM"
tbl <- table(strsplit(a, "B"), exclude="")
tbl
# MM MMM MMMM
# 2 2 1
score <- sum(tbl * 1:3)
score
# 9

Answer 2

You could also use the table function.
a_list<-unlist(strsplit(a,"B"))
a_list<-a_list[!a_list==""] #remove cases when 2 B are together
a_list<-table(a_list)
# MM MMM MMMM
# 2 2 1

Answer 3

Here's a solution that uses the dplyr package. First, I load the library and define my string.
library(dplyr)
a <- "BMMBMMMMBMMMBMMBBMMM"
Next, I define a function that counts the occurrences of character x in string y.
char_count <- function(x, y){
# Get runs of same character
tmp <- rle(strsplit(y, split = "")[[1]])
# Count runs of character stored in `x`
tmp <- data.frame(table(tmp$lengths[tmp$values == x]))
# Return strings and frequencies
tmp %>%
mutate(String = strrep(x, Var1)) %>%
select(String, Freq)
}
Then, I run the function.
# Run the function
res <- char_count("M", a)
# String Freq
# 1 M 2
# 2 MM 2
# 3 MMM 1
Finally, I define my value vector and calculate the total value of vector a.
# My value vector
value_vec <- c(M = 1, MM = 2, MMM = 3)
# Total `value` of vector `a`
sum(value_vec * res$Freq)
#[1] 9

Answer 4

It it's acceptable to skip the first step you could do:
nchar(gsub("(B+M)|(^M)","",a))
# [1] 9

Answer 5

First compute all diffrent patterns that appear in your sting :
a <- "BMMBMMMMBMMMBMMBBMMM"
chars = unlist(strsplit(a, ""))
pat = c()
for ( i in 1:length(chars)){
for (j in 1:(length(chars) - i+1)){ pat = c(pat, paste(chars[j:(j+i-1)], collapse = ""))}}
pat =sort(unique(pat))
pat[1:5] : [1] "B" "BB" "BBM" "BBMM" "BBMMM"
Next, count the occurence of each pattern :
counts = sapply(pat, function(w) length(gregexpr(w, a, fixed = TRUE)[[1]]))
Finally build a nice dataframe to summary everything up :
df = data.frame(counts = counts, num = 1:length(pat))
head(df, 10)
counts num
B 6 1
BB 1 2
BBM 1 3
BBMM 1 4
BBMMM 1 5
BM 5 6
BMM 5 7
BMMB 2 8
BMMBB 1 9
BMMBBM 1 10

Answer 6

library(stringr)
str_count(a, "MMMM")
gives 1
str_count(gsub("MMMM", "", a), "MMM") # now count how many times "MMM" occurs, but first delete the "MMMM"
gives 2
str_count(gsub("MMM", "", a), "MM") #now count how many times "MM" occurs, but first delete the "MMM"'s
gives 2