R regular expression for p#q#c# - r

Question

What would the regular expression be to encompass variable names such as p3q10000c150 and p29q2990c98? I want to add all variables in the format of p-any number-q-any number-c-any number to a list in R.
Thanks!

Answer 1

I think you are looking for something like matches function in dplyr::select:
df = data.frame(1:10, 1:10, 1:10, 1:10)
names(df) = c("p3q10000c150", "V1", "p29q2990c98", "V2")
library(dplyr)
df %>%
select(matches("^p\\d+q\\d+c\\d+$"))
Result:
p3q10000c150 p29q2990c98
1 1 1
2 2 2
3 3 3
4 4 4
5 5 5
6 6 6
7 7 7
8 8 8
9 9 9
10 10 10
matches in select allows you to use regex to extract variables.

Answer 2

If your objective is to pull out the 3 numbers and put them in a 3 column data frame or matrix then any of these alternatives would do it.
The regular expression in #1 matches p and then one or more digits and then q and then one or more digits and then c and one or more digits. The parentheses form capture groups which are placed in the corresponding columns of the prototype data frame given as the third argument.
In #2 each non-digit ("\\D") is replaced with a space and then read.table reads in the data using the indicated column names.
In #3 we convert each element of the input to DCF format, namely c("\np: 3\nq: 10000\nc: 150", "\np: 29\nq: 2990\nc: 98") and then read it in using read.dcf and conver the columns to numeric. This creates a matrix whereas the prior two alternatives create data frames.
The second alternative seems simplest but the third one is more general in that it does not hard code the header names or the number of columns. (If we used col.names = strsplit(input, "\\d+")[[1]] in #2 then it would be similarly general.)
# 1
strcapture("p(\\d+)q(\\d+)c(\\d+)", input,
data.frame(p = character(), q = character(), c = character()))
# 2
read.table(text = gsub("\\D", " ", input), col.names = c("p", "q", "c"))
# 3
apply(read.dcf(textConnection(gsub("(\\D)", "\n\\1: ", input))), 2, as.numeric)
The first two above give this data.frame and the third one gives the corresponding numeric matrix.
p q c
1 3 10000 150
2 29 2990 98
Note: The input is assumed to be:
input <- c("p3q10000c150", "p29q2990c98")

Answer 3

Try:
x <- c("p3q10000c150", "p29q2990c98")
sapply(strsplit(x, "[pqc]"), function(i){
setNames(as.numeric(i[-1]), c("p", "q", "c"))
})
# [,1] [,2]
# p 3 29
# q 10000 2990
# c 150 98

Answer 4

I'll assume you have a data frame called df with variables names names(df). If you want to only retain the variables with the structure p<somenumbers>q<somenumbers>c<somenumbers> you could use the regex that Wiktor Stribiżew suggested in the comments like this:
valid_vars <- grepl("p\\d+q\\d+c\\d", names(df))
df2 <- df[, valid_vars]
grepl() will return a vector of TRUE and FALSE values, indicating which element in names(df) follows the structure you suggested. Afterwards you use the output of grepl() to subset your data frame.
For clarity, observe:
var_names_test <- c("p3q10000c150", "p29q2990c98", "var1")
grepl("p\\d+q\\d+c\\d", var_names_test)
# [1] TRUE TRUE FALSE