Getting Initials from a string in R - r

What is the best way to extract the initials from a string (except for the last word)? For example convert "GEORGE SMITH BROGAN" to "GS BROGAN"
NAMES <- data.frame(ID = c("GEORGE SMITH BROGAN","ADAM STEVE WILLIS","UNITED INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING STATION")
The desired output for the above names would be GS BROGAN, AS WILLIS, UIS STATION.

We can try with gsub
gsub("\\s+(?=[A-Z]\\b)", "",
gsub("\\b([A-Z])\\w+\\s|\\s(\\w+)$", "\\1 \\2", NAMES$ID), perl = TRUE)
#[1] "GS BROGAN" "AS WILLIS" "UIS STATION"
Or use strsplit with paste
sapply(strsplit(as.character(NAMES$ID), "\\s+"),
function(x) paste(paste(substr(x[-length(x)], 1, 1), collapse=""),
x[length(x)]))
#[1] "GS BROGAN" "AS WILLIS" "UIS STATION"

Here is a different method using gsub:
gsub('\\s(?![A-Z]+$)', '',
gsub('(?<!\\s|^)[A-Z]+\\s', ' ', NAMES$ID,
perl = TRUE), perl = TRUE)
# [1] "GS BROGAN" "AS WILLIS" "UIS STATION"

Related

Splitting text into separate fuctions

I have a spreadsheet in "R" where a column is a full Name (last name, first name middle name) ex Thompson, Billy Red. I am trying to run a function that separates that operates them and will produce only first name.
Example code that I am using. I need the "get_first_name" created any ideas?
top.25 <- head( d$Full.Name,25 )
first.25 <- get_first_name( name=top.25 )
data.frame( top.25, first.25 ) %>% pander()
This should work:
get_first_name <- function(x) {
sub(" .*", "", sub(".*, ", "", x))}
Example:
Full.Name <- c("Thompson, Billy Red", "Smith, John", "St Croix, Some Body")
get_first_name(Full.Name)
Result:
[1] "Billy" "John" "Some"
Rationale:
First, the function extracts everything that is after ", " (comma + space):
sub(".*, ", "", x)
Second, it extracts everything that is before " " (space):
sub(" .*", "", y)
Replace the first step as the "y" in the second step, and assign it to your function.

Match two character strings by location in R

string <- paste(append(rep(" ", 7), append("A", append(rep(" ", 8), append("B", append(rep(" ", 17), "C"))))), collapse = "")
text <- paste(append(rep(" ", 7), append("I love", append(rep(" ", 3), append("chocolate", append(rep(" ", 9), "pudding"))))), collapse = "")
string
[1] " A B C"
text
[1] " I love chocolate pudding"
I am trying to match letters in "string" with text in "text" such that to the letter A corresponds the text "I love" to B corresponds "chocolate" and to C "pudding". Ideally, I would like to put A, B, C in column 1 and three different rows of a dataframe (or tibble) and the text in column 2 and the corresponding rows. Any suggestion?
It is hard to know whether the strings in which you are trying to manipulate and then collate into columns in a data.frame follow a pattern. But for the example you posted, I suggest creating a list with the strings (strings):
strings <- list(string, text)
Then use lapply() which will in turn create a list for each element in strings.
res <-lapply(strings, function(x){
grep(x=trimws(unlist(strsplit(x, "\\s\\s"))), pattern="[[:alpha:]]", value=TRUE)
})
In the code above, strsplit() splits the string whenever two spaces are found (\\s\\s). But the resulting split is a list with the strings as inner elements. Therefore you need to use unlist() so you can use it with grep(). grep() will select only those strings with an alphanumeric character --which is what you want.
You can then use do.call(cbind, list) to bind the elements in the resulting lapply() list into columns. The dimension must match for this work.
do.call(cbind, res)
Result:
> do.call(cbind, res)
[,1] [,2]
[1,] "A" "I love"
[2,] "B" "chocolate"
[3,] "C" "pudding"
You can wrap it up into a as.data.frame() for instance to get the desired result:
> as.data.frame(do.call(cbind, res), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
V1 V2
1 A I love
2 B chocolate
3 C pudding
You can use read.fwf and get the positions using nchar.
read.fwf(file=textConnection(text),
widths=c(diff(c(1, gregexpr("\\w", string)[[1]])), nchar(text)))[-1]
# V2 V3 V4
#1 I love chocolate pudding
In case the white spaces should be removed use also trimws:
trimws(read.fwf(file=textConnection(text),
widths=c(diff(c(1, gregexpr("\\w", string)[[1]])), nchar(text)))[-1])
#[1] "I love" "chocolate" "pudding"
Based on your data, I came up with this workaround by using the package stringr. This only works with that kind of pattern, so in case you have erratic ones you need to adjust it.
The output is a data.frame with two columns given by your two input data and rows according to the matches.
library(stringr)
string <- paste(append(rep(" ", 7), append("A", append(rep(" ", 8), append("B", append(rep(" ", 17), "C"))))), collapse = "")
text <- paste(append(rep(" ", 7), append("I love", append(rep(" ", 3), append("chocolate", append(rep(" ", 9), "pudding"))))), collapse = "")
string_nospace <- str_replace_all( string, "\\s{1,20}", " " )
string_nospace <- str_trim( string_nospace )
string_nospace <- data.frame( string = t(str_split(string_nospace, "\\s", simplify = TRUE)))
text_nospace <- str_replace_all( text, "\\s{2,20}", "_" )
text_nospace <- str_sub(text_nospace, start = 2)
text_nospace <- data.frame(text = t(str_split(text_nospace, "_", simplify = TRUE)))
df = data.frame(string = string_nospace,
text = text_nospace )
df
#> string text
#> 1 A I love
#> 2 B chocolate
#> 3 C pudding
Created on 2020-06-08 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)

String splitting with a stop character in R

My data is as follows:
“Louis Hamilton”
“Tiger Wolf”
“Sachin Tendulkar”
“Lebron James”
“Michael Shoemaker”
“Hollywood – Career as an Actor”
I need to extract all the characters until a space or a dash(-) is reached
I need to extract no more than 10 characters
My desired output is
“Louis”
“Tiger”
“Sachin”
“Lebron”
“Michael”
“Hollywood”
I tried using below function, but it didn’t work
Sportstars<-function(charvec)
{min.length < 10, (x, hyph.pattern = Null)}
Can anyone help, please?
We can use sub
sub("^([^- ]+).*", "\\1", v1)
#[1] "Louis" "Tiger" "Sachin" "Lebron" "Michael" "Hollywood"
Or another version with the length condition as well
grep("^.{1,10}$", sub("\\s+.*", "", v1), value = TRUE)
#[1] "Louis" "Tiger" "Sachin" "Lebron" "Michael" "Hollywood"
Or with word from stringr
library(stringr)
word(v1, 1)
#[1] "Louis" "Tiger" "Sachin" "Lebron" "Michael" "Hollywood"
Also, if we need to implement the last condition as well
sapply(strsplit(v1, "[– -]"), function(x) {
x1 <- setdiff(x, "")
x1[1][nchar(x1[1]) < 10]})
#[1] "Louis" "Tiger" "Sachin" "Lebron" "Michael" "Hollywood"
data
v1 <- c( "Louis Hamilton", "Tiger Wolf", "Sachin Tendulkar",
"Lebron James", "Michael Shoemaker", "Hollywood – Career as an Actor")

How to do str_extract with base R?

I am balancing several versions of R and want to change my R libraries loaded depending on which R and which operating system I'm using. As such, I want to stick with base R functions.
I was reading this page to see what the base R equivalent to stringr::str_extract was:
http://stat545.com/block022_regular-expression.html
It suggested I could replicate this functionality with grep. However, I haven't been able to get grep to do more than return the whole string if there is a match. Is this possible with grep alone, or do I need to combine it with another function? In my case I'm trying to distinguish between CentOS versions 6 and 7.
grep(pattern = "release ([0-9]+)", x = readLines("/etc/system-release"), value = TRUE)
1) strcapture If you want to extract a string of digits and dots from "release 1.2.3" using base then
x <- "release 1.2.3"
strcapture("([0-9.]+)", x, data.frame(version = character(0)))
## version
## 1 1.2.3
2) regexec/regmatches There is also regmatches and regexec but that has already been covered in another answer.
3) sub Also it is often possible to use sub:
sub(".* ([0-9.]+).*", "\\1", x)
## [1] "1.2.3"
3a) If you know the match is at the beginning or end then delete everything after or before it:
sub(".* ", "", x)
## [1] "1.2.3"
4) gsub Sometimes we know that the field to be extracted has certain characters and they do not appear elsewhere. In that case simply delete every occurrence of every character that cannot be in the string:
gsub("[^0-9.]", "", x)
## [1] "1.2.3"
5) read.table One can often decompose the input into fields and then pick off the desired one by number or via grep. strsplit, read.table or scan can be used:
read.table(text = x, as.is = TRUE)[[2]]
## [1] "1.2.3"
5a) grep/scan
grep("^[0-9.]+$", scan(textConnection(x), what = "", quiet = TRUE), value = TRUE)
## [1] "1.2.3"
5b) grep/strsplit
grep("^[0-9.]+$", strsplit(x, " ")[[1]], value = TRUE)
## [1] "1.2.3"
6) substring If we know the character position of the field we can use substring like this:
substring(x, 9)
## [1] "1.2.3"
6a) substring/regexpr or we may be able to use regexpr to locate the character position for us:
substring(x, regexpr("\\d", x))
## [1] "1.2.3"
7) read.dcf Sometimes it is possible to convert the input to dcf form in which case it can be read with read.dcf. Such data is of the form name: value
read.dcf(textConnection(sub(" ", ": ", x)))
## release
## [1,] "1.2.3"
You could do
txt <- c("foo release 123", "bar release", "foo release 123 bar release 123")
pattern <- "release ([0-9]+)"
stringr::str_extract(txt, pattern)
# [1] "release 123" NA "release 123"
sapply(regmatches(txt, regexec(pattern, txt)), "[", 1)
# [1] "release 123" NA "release 123"
txt <- c("foo release 123", "bar release", "foo release 123 bar release 123")
pattern <- "release ([0-9]+)"
Extract first match
sapply(
X = txt,
FUN = function(x){
tmp = regexpr(pattern, x)
m = attr(tmp, "match.length")
st = unlist(tmp)
if (st == -1){NA}else{substr(x, start = st, stop = st + m - 1)}
},
USE.NAMES = FALSE)
#[1] "release 123" NA "release 123"
Extract all matches
sapply(
X = txt,
FUN = function(x){
tmp = gregexpr(pattern, x)
m = attr(tmp[[1]], "match.length")
st = unlist(tmp)
if (st[1] == -1){
NA
}else{
sapply(seq_along(st), function(i) substr(x, st[i], st[i] + m[i] - 1))
}
},
USE.NAMES = FALSE)
#[[1]]
#[1] "release 123"
#[[2]]
#[1] NA
#[[3]]
#[1] "release 123" "release 123"

Extract names and covert to email addresses in R

I have the following string: " John Andrew Thomas"(4 empty spaces before John) and I need to split and concat it so my output is "John#gmail.com;Andrew#gmail.com;Thomas#gmail.com", also I need to remove all whitespaces.
My best guess is:
test = unlist(lapply(names, strsplit, split = " ", fixed = FALSE))
paste(test, collapse = "#gmail.com")
but I get this as an output:
"#gmail.com#gmail.com#gmail.com#gmail.comJohn#gmail.comAndrew#gmail.comThomas"
names <- " John Andrew Thomas"
test <- unlist(lapply(names, strsplit, split = " ", fixed = FALSE))
paste(test[test != ""],"#gmail.com",sep = "",collapse = ";")
A small tweak to your paste line will remove the extra spaces and separate the email addresses with a semicolon.
Output is the following:
[1] "John#gmail.com;Andrew#gmail.com;Thomas#gmail.com"
With stringr, so we can use its str_trim function to deal with your leading whitespace, and assuming your string is x:
library(stringr)
paste(sapply(str_split(str_trim(x), " "), function(i) sprintf("%s#gmail.com", i)), collapse = ";")
And here's a piped version, so it's easier to follow:
library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
x %>%
# get rid of leading and trailing whitespace
str_trim() %>%
# make a list with the elements of the string, split at " "
str_split(" ") %>%
# get an array of strings where those list elements are added to a fixed chunk via sprintf
sapply(., function(i) sprintf("%s#gmail.com", i)) %>%
# concatenate the resulting array into a single string with semicolons
paste(., collapse = ";")
Another approach using trimws function of base R
paste0(unlist(strsplit(trimws(names)," ")),"#gmail.com",collapse = ";")
#[1] "John#gmail.com;Andrew#gmail.com;Thomas#gmail.com"
Data
names <- " John Andrew Thomas"
Another idea using stringi:
v <- " John Andrew Thomas"
paste0(stringi::stri_extract_all_words(v, simplify = TRUE), "#gmail.com", collapse = ";")
Which gives:
#[1] "John#gmail.com;Andrew#gmail.com;Thomas#gmail.com"
You can use gsub(), and a little creativity.
x <- " John Andrew Thomas"
paste0(gsub(" ", "#gmail.com;", trimws(x)), "#gmail.com")
# [1] "John#gmail.com;Andrew#gmail.com;Thomas#gmail.com"
No packages, no loops, and no string splitting.

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