Two PASTE functions in a character vector - r

attach.files = c(paste("/users/joesmith/nosection_", currentDate,".csv",sep=""),
paste("/users/joesmith/withsection_", currentDate,".csv",sep=""))
Basically, if I did it like
c("nosection_051418.csv", "withsection_051418.csv")
And I did that manually it would work fine but since I'm automating this to run every day I can't do that.
I'm trying to attach files in an automated email but when I structure it like this, it doesn't work. How can I recreate this so that the character vector accepts it?

I thought your example implied the need for "parallel" inputs to the path stem, the first portion of the file name, and the date portions of those full paths. Consider this illustration of using a 2 item vector and a one item vector (produced by Sys.Date, replacing your "currentdate") to populate the %s positions in that sprintf string (suggested by #Gregor):
sprintf("/users/joesmith/%s_%s.csv", c("nosection", "withsection"), Sys.Date() )
[1] "/users/joesmith/nosection_2018-05-14.csv" "/users/joesmith/withsection_2018-05-14.csv"

Related

Saving data with a built name in R

In an R script, I assign a name to some data. The name depends on parameters. I do this using
number<-1
assign(paste("variable", as.character(number), sep=""),2)
The above accomplices the same as variable1<-2. Now I want to save the result for later
save(?,file=paste("variable",as.character(number),".RData",sep=""))
What code can go in the ? slot where it should say variable1 except I need to construct this name using paste or some similar technique. Simply putting get(paste("variable",as.character(number),".RData",sep="")) does not work.
save can also use list as parameter. According to ?save
list - A character vector containing the names of objects to be saved.
Thus, we specify the object name as a string (paste0('variable', number)) for the list argument and file as the one used by OP (or make it more concise with paste0 (as.character is not necessary as integer/numeric gets automatically convert to type character in paste
save(list = paste0('variable', number),
file = paste0("variable", number, ".RData"))
Check for the file created in the working directory
list.files(getwd(), pattern = '\\.RData$')
#[1] "variable1.RData"

Use substr with start and stop words, instead of integers

I want to extract information from downloaded html-Code. The html-Code is given as a string. The required information is stored inbetween specific html-expressions. For example, if I want to have every headline in the string, I have to search for "H1>" and "/H1>" and the text between these html expressions.
So far, I used substr(), but I had to calculate the position of "H1>" and "/H1>" first.
htmlcode = " some html code <H1>headline</H1> some other code <H1>headline2</H1> "
startposition = c(21,55) # calculated with gregexpr
stopposition = c(28, 63) # calculated with gregexpr
substr(htmlcode, startposition[1], stopposition[1])
substr(htmlcode, startposition[2], stopposition[2])
The output is correct, but to calculate every single start and stopposition is a lot of work. Instead I search for a similar function like substr (), where you can use start and stop words instead of the position. For example like this:
function(htmlcode, startword = "H1>", stopword = "/H1>")
I'd agree that using a package built for html processing is probably the best way to handle the example you give. However, one potential way to sub-string a string based on character values would be to do the following.
Step 1: Define a simple function to return to position of a character in a string, in this example I am only using fixed character strings.
strpos_fixed=function(string,char){
a<-gregexpr(char,string,fixed=T)
b<-a[[1]][1:length(a[[1]])]
return(b)
}
Step 2: Define your new sub-string function using the strpos_fixed() function you just defined
char_substr<-function(string,start,stop){
x<-strpos_fixed(string,start)+nchar(start)
y<-strpos_fixed(string,stop)-1
z<-cbind(x,y)
apply(z,1,function(x){substr(string,x[1],x[2])})
}
Step 3: Test
htmlcode = " some html code <H1>headline</H1> some other code <H1>headline2</H1> "
htmlcode2 = " some html code <H1>baa dee ya</H1> some other code <H1>say do you remember?</H1>"
htmlcode3<- "<x>baa dee ya</x> skdjalhgfjafha <x>dancing in september</x>"
char_substr(htmlcode,"<H1>","</H1>")
char_substr(htmlcode2,"<H1>","</H1>")
char_substr(htmlcode3,"<x>","</x>")
You have two options here. First, use a package that has been developed explicitly for the parsing of HTML structures, e.g., rvest. There are a number of tutorials online.
Second, for edge cases where you may need to extract from strings that are not necessarily well-formatted HTML you should use regular expressions. One of the simpler implementations for this comes from stringr::str_match:
# 1. the parenthesis define regex groups
# 2. ".*?" means any character, non-greedy
# 3. so together we are matching the expression <H1>some text or characters of any length</H1>
str_match(htmlcode, "(<H1>)(.*?)(</H1>)")
This will yield a matrix where the columns are (in order) the fully matched string followed by each independent regex group we specified. You would just want to pull the second group in this case if you want whatever text is between the <H1> tags (3rd column).

R - Split character vector using regex

I've got some kind of logfile I'd like to read and analyse. Unfortunately the files are saved in a pretty "ugly" way (with lots of special characters in between), so I'm not able to read in just the lines with each one being an entry. The only way to separate the different entries is using regular expressions, since the beginning of each entry follows a specified pattern.
My first approach was to identify the pattern in the character vector (I use read_file from the readr-package) and use the corresponding positions to split the vector with strsplit. Unfortunately the positions seem not always to match, since the result doesn't always correspond to the entries (I'd guess that there's a problem with the special characters).
A typical line of the file looks as follows:
16/10/2017, 21:51 - George: This is a typical entry here
The corresponding regular expressions looks as follows:
([[:digit:]]{2})/([[:digit:]]{2})/([[:digit:]]{4}), ([[:digit:]]{2}):([[:digit:]]{2}) - ([[:alpha:]]+):
The first thing I want is a data.frame with each line corresponding to a specific entry (in a next step I'd split the pattern into its different parts).
What I tried so far was the following:
regex.log = "([[:digit:]]{2})/([[:digit:]]{2})/([[:digit:]]{4}), ([[:digit:]]{2}):([[:digit:]]{2}) - ([[:alpha:]]+):"
log.regex = gregexpr(regex.log, file.log)[[1]]
log.splitted = substring(file.log, log.regex, log.regex[2:355]-1)
As can be seen this logfile has 355 entries. The first ones are separated correctly. How can I separate the character vector using a regular expression without loosing the information of the regular expression/pattern?
Use capturing and non-capturing groups to identify the parts you want to keep, and be sure to use anchors:
file.log = "16/10/2017, 21:51 - George: This is a typical entry here"
regex.log = "^((?:[[:digit:]]{2})\\/(?:[[:digit:]]{2})\\/(?:[[:digit:]]{4}), (?:[[:digit:]]{2}):(?:[[:digit:]]{2}) - (?:[[:alpha:]]+)): (.*)$"
gsub(regex.log,"\\1",file.log)
>> "16/10/2017, 21:51 - George"
gsub(regex.log,"\\2",file.log)
>> "This is a typical entry here"

readcsv fails to read # character in Julia

I've been using asd=readcsv(filename) to read a csv file in Julia.
The first row of the csv file contains strings which describe the column contents; the rest of the data is a mix of integers and floats. readcsv reads the numbers just fine, but only reads the first 4+1/2 string entries.
After that, it renders "". If I ask the REPL to display asd[1,:], it tells me it is 1x65 Array{Any,2}.
The fifth column in the first row of the csv file (this seems to be the entry it chokes on) is APP #1 bias voltage [V]; but asd[1,5] is just APP . So it looks to me as though readcsv has choked on the "#" character.
I tried using "quotes=false" keyword in readcsv, but it didn't help.
I used to use xlsread in Matlab and it worked fine.
Has anybody out there seen this sort of thing before?
The comment character in Julia is #, and this applies when reading files from delimited text files.
But luckily, the readcsv() and readdlm() functions have an optional argument to help in these situations.
You should try readcsv(filename; comment_char = '/').
Of course, the example above assumes that you don't have any / characters in your first line. If you do, then you'll have to change that / above to something else.

R: Extract value and lines after key word (text file mining)

Setting:
I have (simple) .csv and .dat files created from laboratory devices and other programs storing information on measurements or calculations. I have found this for other languages but nor for R
Problem:
Using R, I am trying to extract values to quickly display results w/o opening the created files. Hereby I have two typical settings:
a) I need to read a priori unknown values after known key words
b) I need to read lines after known key words or lines
I can't make functions such as scan() and grep() work.
c) Finally I would like to loop over dozens of files in a folder and give me a summary (to make the picture complete: I will manage this part)
I woul appreciate any form of help.
ok, it works for the key value (although perhaps not very nice)
variable<-scan("file.csv", what=character(),sep="")
returns a charactor vector of everything
variable[grep("keyword", ks)+2] # + 2 as the actual value is stored two places ahead
returns characters of seaked values.
as.numeric(lapply(variable, gsub, patt=",", replace="."))
for completion: data had to be altered to number and "," and "." problem needed to be solved.
in a line:
data=as.numeric(lapply(ks[grep("Ks_Boden", ks)+2], gsub, patt=",", replace="."))
Perseverence is not to bad of an asset ;-)
The rest isn't finished, yet, I will post once finished.

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