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How can I get the last n characters from a string in R?
Is there a function like SQL's RIGHT?
I'm not aware of anything in base R, but it's straight-forward to make a function to do this using substr and nchar:
x <- "some text in a string"
substrRight <- function(x, n){
substr(x, nchar(x)-n+1, nchar(x))
}
substrRight(x, 6)
[1] "string"
substrRight(x, 8)
[1] "a string"
This is vectorised, as #mdsumner points out. Consider:
x <- c("some text in a string", "I really need to learn how to count")
substrRight(x, 6)
[1] "string" " count"
If you don't mind using the stringr package, str_sub is handy because you can use negatives to count backward:
x <- "some text in a string"
str_sub(x,-6,-1)
[1] "string"
Or, as Max points out in a comment to this answer,
str_sub(x, start= -6)
[1] "string"
Use stri_sub function from stringi package.
To get substring from the end, use negative numbers.
Look below for the examples:
stri_sub("abcde",1,3)
[1] "abc"
stri_sub("abcde",1,1)
[1] "a"
stri_sub("abcde",-3,-1)
[1] "cde"
You can install this package from github: https://github.com/Rexamine/stringi
It is available on CRAN now, simply type
install.packages("stringi")
to install this package.
str = 'This is an example'
n = 7
result = substr(str,(nchar(str)+1)-n,nchar(str))
print(result)
> [1] "example"
>
Another reasonably straightforward way is to use regular expressions and sub:
sub('.*(?=.$)', '', string, perl=T)
So, "get rid of everything followed by one character". To grab more characters off the end, add however many dots in the lookahead assertion:
sub('.*(?=.{2}$)', '', string, perl=T)
where .{2} means .., or "any two characters", so meaning "get rid of everything followed by two characters".
sub('.*(?=.{3}$)', '', string, perl=T)
for three characters, etc. You can set the number of characters to grab with a variable, but you'll have to paste the variable value into the regular expression string:
n = 3
sub(paste('.+(?=.{', n, '})', sep=''), '', string, perl=T)
UPDATE: as noted by mdsumner, the original code is already vectorised because substr is. Should have been more careful.
And if you want a vectorised version (based on Andrie's code)
substrRight <- function(x, n){
sapply(x, function(xx)
substr(xx, (nchar(xx)-n+1), nchar(xx))
)
}
> substrRight(c("12345","ABCDE"),2)
12345 ABCDE
"45" "DE"
Note that I have changed (nchar(x)-n) to (nchar(x)-n+1) to get n characters.
A simple base R solution using the substring() function (who knew this function even existed?):
RIGHT = function(x,n){
substring(x,nchar(x)-n+1)
}
This takes advantage of basically being substr() underneath but has a default end value of 1,000,000.
Examples:
> RIGHT('Hello World!',2)
[1] "d!"
> RIGHT('Hello World!',8)
[1] "o World!"
Try this:
x <- "some text in a string"
n <- 5
substr(x, nchar(x)-n, nchar(x))
It shoudl give:
[1] "string"
An alternative to substr is to split the string into a list of single characters and process that:
N <- 2
sapply(strsplit(x, ""), function(x, n) paste(tail(x, n), collapse = ""), N)
I use substr too, but in a different way. I want to extract the last 6 characters of "Give me your food." Here are the steps:
(1) Split the characters
splits <- strsplit("Give me your food.", split = "")
(2) Extract the last 6 characters
tail(splits[[1]], n=6)
Output:
[1] " " "f" "o" "o" "d" "."
Each of the character can be accessed by splits[[1]][x], where x is 1 to 6.
someone before uses a similar solution to mine, but I find it easier to think as below:
> text<-"some text in a string" # we want to have only the last word "string" with 6 letter
> n<-5 #as the last character will be counted with nchar(), here we discount 1
> substr(x=text,start=nchar(text)-n,stop=nchar(text))
This will bring the last characters as desired.
For those coming from Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, you would have seen functions like LEFT(), RIGHT(), and MID(). I have created a package known as forstringr and its development version is currently on Github.
if(!require("devtools")){
install.packages("devtools")
}
devtools::install_github("gbganalyst/forstringr")
library(forstringr)
the str_left(): This counts from the left and then extract n characters
the str_right()- This counts from the right and then extract n characters
the str_mid()- This extract characters from the middle
Examples:
x <- "some text in a string"
str_left(x, 4)
[1] "some"
str_right(x, 6)
[1] "string"
str_mid(x, 6, 4)
[1] "text"
I used the following code to get the last character of a string.
substr(output, nchar(stringOfInterest), nchar(stringOfInterest))
You can play with the nchar(stringOfInterest) to figure out how to get last few characters.
A little modification on #Andrie solution gives also the complement:
substrR <- function(x, n) {
if(n > 0) substr(x, (nchar(x)-n+1), nchar(x)) else substr(x, 1, (nchar(x)+n))
}
x <- "moSvmC20F.5.rda"
substrR(x,-4)
[1] "moSvmC20F.5"
That was what I was looking for. And it invites to the left side:
substrL <- function(x, n){
if(n > 0) substr(x, 1, n) else substr(x, -n+1, nchar(x))
}
substrL(substrR(x,-4),-2)
[1] "SvmC20F.5"
Just in case if a range of characters need to be picked:
# For example, to get the date part from the string
substrRightRange <- function(x, m, n){substr(x, nchar(x)-m+1, nchar(x)-m+n)}
value <- "REGNDATE:20170526RN"
substrRightRange(value, 10, 8)
[1] "20170526"
I'm trying to use str_detect, but it returns "FALSE" when the pattern I'm looking for actually is in the string.
Here is a code:
monkey=paste(sample(LETTERS, 10, replace = TRUE), collapse = " ")
When I run this line, I get something like this
[1] "L Y W G Q R W G X L"
But when I try to find the pattern YW, for example, str_detect returns FALSE. Maybe I don't understand really well how str_detect works, I used
str_detect(monkey, "YW")
Any help will be appreciated
If the intention is to look for any character that is 'Y' or 'W', wrap it inside square brackets or else it will be looking for that case where 'Y' followed by 'W' which didn't exist in the string as there is a space character between Y and W
library(stringr)
str_detect(monkey, "[YW]")
[1] TRUE
If we really wanted to check the pattern 'Y' followed by 'W', specify the space and use a fixed pattern (should be faster) - by default it is in regex mode
str_detect(monkey, fixed("Y W"))
#[1] TRUE
Or if we are not sure whether there are spaces or not, specify \\s* i.e. zero or more spaces
str_detect(monkey, "Y\\s*W")
#[1] TRUE
which will match "YW", "Y W", or "Y W" etc.
data
monkey <- "L Y W G Q R W G X L"
Perhaps you can try a utf8ToInt way like below:
If you want to detect both "Y" and "W" in monkey
all(utf8ToInt("YW") %in% utf8ToInt(monkey))
If you want to detect any of "Y" and "W" in monkey
any(utf8ToInt("YW") %in% utf8ToInt(monkey))
I need to remove the text before the leading period (as well as the leading period) and the text following the last period from a string.
Given this string for example:
"ABCD.EF.GH.IJKL.MN"
I'd like to get the output:
[1] "IJKL"
I have tried the following:
split_string <- sub("^.*?\\.","", string)
split_string <- sub("^\\.+|\\.[^.]*$", "", string)
I believe I have it working for the period and text after for that string output I want. However, the first line needs to be executed multiple times to remove the text before that period in question e.g. '.I'.
One option in base R is to capture as a group ((...)) the word followed by the dot (\\.) and the word (\\w+) till the end ($) of the string. In the replacement, use the backreference (\\1) of the captured word
sub(".*\\.(\\w+)\\.\\w+$", "\\1", str1)
#[1] "IJKL"
Here, we match characters (.*) till the . (\\. - escaped to get the literal value because . is a metacharacter that will match any character if not escaped), followed by the word captured ((\\w+)), followed by a dot and another word at the end ($)of the string. The replacement part is mentioned above
Or another option is regmatches/regexpr from base R
regmatches(str1, regexpr("\\w+(?=\\.\\w+$)", str1, perl = TRUE))
#[1] "IJKL"
Or another option is word from stringr
library(stringr)
word(str1, -2, sep="[.]")
#[1] "IJKL"
data
str1 <- "ABCD.EF.GH.IJKL.MN"
Here is a janky dplyr version in case the other values are of importance and you want to select them later on, just include them in the "select".
df<- data.frame(x=c("ABCD.EF.GH.IJKL.MN"))
df2<-df %>%
separate(x, into=c("var1", "var2","var3","var4","var5")) %>%
select("var4")
Split into groups at period and take the second one from last.
sapply(strsplit(str1, "\\."), function(x) x[length(x) - 1])
#[1] "IJKL"
Get indices of the periods and use substr to extract the relevant portion
sapply(str1, function(x){
ind = gregexpr("\\.", x)[[1]]
substr(x, ind[length(ind) - 1] + 1, ind[length(ind)] - 1)
}, USE.NAMES = FALSE)
#[1] "IJKL"
These alternatives all use no packages or regular expressions.
1) basename/dirname Assuming the test input s shown in the Note at the end convert the dots to slashes and then use dirname and basename.
basename(dirname(chartr(".", "/", s)))
## [1] "IJKL" "IJKL"
2) strsplit Using strsplit split the strings at dot creating a list of character vectors, one vector per input string, and then for each such vector take the last 2 elements using tail and the first of those using indexing.
sapply(strsplit(s, ".", fixed = TRUE), function(x) tail(x, 2)[1])
## [1] "IJKL" "IJKL"
3) read.table It is not clear from the question what the general case is but if all the components of s have the same number of dot separated fields then we can use read.table to create a data.frame with one row per input string and one column per dot-separated component. Then take the column just before the last.
dd <- read.table(text = s, sep = ".", as.is = TRUE)
dd[[ncol(dd)-1]]
## [1] "IJKL" "IJKL"
4) substr Again, the general case is not clear but if the string of interest is always at character positions 12-15 then a simple solution is:
substr(s, 12, 15)
## [1] "IJKL" "IJKL"
Note
s <- c("ABCD.EF.GH.IJKL.MN", "ABCD.EF.GH.IJKL.MN")
I have a column as below.
9453, 55489, 4588, 18893, 4457, 2339, 45489HQ, 7833HQ
I would like to add leading zero if the number is less than 5 digits. However, some numbers have "HQ" in the end, some don't.(I did check other posts, they dont have similar problem in the "HQ" part)
so the finally desired output should be:
09453, 55489, 04588, 18893, 04457, 02339, 45489HQ, 07833HQ
any idea how to do this? Thank you so much for reading my post!
A one-liner using regular expressions:
my_strings <- c("9453", "55489", "4588",
"18893", "4457", "2339", "45489HQ", "7833HQ")
gsub("^([0-9]{1,4})(HQ|$)", "0\\1\\2",my_strings)
[1] "09453" "55489" "04588" "18893"
"04457" "02339" "45489HQ" "07833HQ"
Explanation:
^ start of string
[0-9]{1,4} one to four numbers in a row
(HQ|$) the string "HQ" or the end of the string
Parentheses represent capture groups in order. So 0\\1\\2 means 0 followed by the first capture group [0-9]{1,4} and the second capture group HQ|$.
Of course if there is 5 numbers, then the regex isn't matched, so it doesn't change.
I was going to use the sprintf approach, but found the the stringr package provides a very easy solution.
library(stringr)
x <- c("9453", "55489", "4588", "18893", "4457", "2339", "45489HQ", "7833HQ")
[1] "9453" "55489" "4588" "18893" "4457" "2339" "45489HQ" "7833HQ"
This can be converted with one simple stringr::str_pad() function:
stringr::str_pad(x, 5, side="left", pad="0")
[1] "09453" "55489" "04588" "18893" "04457" "02339" "45489HQ" "7833HQ"
If the number needs to be padded even if the total string width is >5, then the number and text need to be separated with regex.
The following will work. It combines regex matching with the very helpful sprintf() function:
sprintf("%05.0f%s", # this encodes the format and recombines the number with padding (%05.0f) with text(%s)
as.numeric(gsub("^(\\d+).*", "\\1", x)), #get the number
gsub("[[:digit:]]+([a-zA-Z]*)$", "\\1", x)) #get just the text at the end
[1] "09453" "55489" "04588" "18893" "04457" "02339" "45489HQ" "07833HQ"
Another attempt, which will also work in cases like "123" or "1HQR":
x <- c("18893","4457","45489HQ","7833HQ","123", "1HQR")
regmatches(x, regexpr("^\\d+", x)) <- sprintf("%05d", as.numeric(sub("\\D+$","",x)))
x
#[1] "18893" "04457" "45489HQ" "07833HQ" "00123" "00001HQR"
This basically finds any numbers at the start of the string (^\\d+) and replaces them with a zero-padded (via sprintf) string that was subset out by removing any non-numeric characters (\\D+$) from the end of the string.
We can use only sprintf() and gsub() by splitting up the parts then putting them back together.
sprintf("%05d%s", as.numeric(gsub("[^0-9]+", "", x)), gsub("[0-9]+", "", x))
# [1] "18893" "04457" "45489HQ" "07833HQ" "00123" "00001HQR"
Using #thelatemail's data:
x <- c("18893", "4457", "45489HQ", "7833HQ", "123", "1HQR")
I have an entire vector of strings with the only special symbol in them being "-"
To be clear a sample string is like 23 C-Exam
I'd like to change it 23-C Exam
I essentially want R to find the location of "-" and move it 2 spaces back.
I feel this is a really simple task although I cant figure out how.
Assume that whenever R finds "-" , two spaces back is whitespace just like the example above.
regex attempt:
x <- c("23 C-Exam","45 D-Exam")
#[1] "23 C-Exam" "45 D-Exam"
sub(".(.)-", "-\\1 ", x)
#[1] "23-C Exam" "45-D Exam"
Find a character ., before a character (.), followed by a literal dash -.
Replace with a literal dash -, the saved character from above \\1, and overwrite the dash with a space
There is probably a sleek way of doing this with regular expressions, but one approach is to simply splice together the various pieces of the desired output. First, I find the index in the string containing the -, and then I use substr() to piece together the output.
pos <- regexpr("-", "23 C-Exam")
x <- "23 C-Exam"
x <- paste0(substr(x, 1, pos-3),
"-",
substr(x, pos-1, pos-1),
" ",
substr(x, pos+1, nchar(x)))
> x
[1] "23-C Exam"
We can also use chartr
chartr(" -", "- ", x)
#[1] "23-C Exam" "45-D Exam"
data
x <- c("23 C-Exam","45 D-Exam")