Regular expressions, extract specific parts of pattern - r

I haven't worked with regular expressions for quite some time, so I'm not sure if what I want to do can be done "directly" or if I have to work around.
My expressions look like the following two:
crb_gdp_g_100000_16_16_ftv_all.txt
crt_r_g_25000_20_40_flin_g_2.txt
Only the parts replaced by a asterisk are "varying", the other stuff is constant (or irrelevant, as in the case of the last part (after "f*_"):
cr*_*_g_*_*_*_f*_
Is there a straightfoward way to get only the values of the asterisk-parts? E.g. in case of "r" or "gdp" I have to include underscores, otherwise I get the r at the beginning of the expression. Including the underscores gives "r" or "gdp", but I only want "r" or "gdp".
Or in short: I know a lot about my expressions but I only want to extract the varying parts. (How) Can I do that?

You can use sub with captures and then strsplit to get a list of the separated elements:
str <- c("crb_gdp_g_100000_16_16_ftv_all.txt", "crt_r_g_25000_20_40_flin_g_2.txt")
strsplit(sub("cr([[:alnum:]]+)_([[:alnum:]]+)_g_([[:alnum:]]+)_([[:alnum:]]+)_([[:alnum:]]+)_f([[:alnum:]]+)_.+", "\\1.\\2.\\3.\\4.\\5.\\6", str), "\\.")
#[[1]]
#[1] "b" "gdp" "100000" "16" "16" "tv"
#[[2]]
#[1] "t" "r" "25000" "20" "40" "lin"
Note: I replaced \\w with [[:alnum:]] to avoid inclusion of the underscore.

We can also use regmatches and regexec to extract these values like this:
regmatches(str, regexec("^cr([^_]+)_([^_]+)_g_([^_]+)_([^_]+)_([^_]+)_f([^_]+)_.*$", str))
[[1]]
[1] "crb_gdp_g_100000_16_16_ftv_all.txt" "b"
[3] "gdp" "100000"
[5] "16" "16"
[7] "tv"
[[2]]
[1] "crt_r_g_25000_20_40_flin_g_2.txt" "t" "r"
[4] "25000" "20" "40"
[7] "lin"
Note that the first element in each vector is the full string, so to drop that, we can use lapply and "["
lapply(regmatches(str,
regexec("^cr([^_]+)_([^_]+)_g_([^_]+)_([^_]+)_([^_]+)_f([^_]+)_.*$", str)),
"[", -1)
[[1]]
[1] "b" "gdp" "100000" "16" "16" "tv"
[[2]]
[1] "t" "r" "25000" "20" "40" "lin"

Related

How to extract words with exactly one vowel

I have strings like these:
turns <- c("does him good to stir him up now and again .",
"when , when I see him he w's on the settees .",
"yes it 's been eery for a long time .",
"blissful timing , indeed it was ")
What I'm trying to do is extract those words that have exactly one vowel. I do get the correct result with this:
library(stringr)
str_extract_all(turns, "\\b[b-df-hj-np-tv-z]*[aeiou][b-df-hj-np-tv-z]*\\b")
[[1]]
[1] "him" "to" "stir" "him" "up" "now" "and"
[[2]]
[1] "when" "when" "i" "him" "he" "on" "the"
[[3]]
[1] "yes" "it" "for" "a" "long"
[[4]]
[1] "it" "was"
However, it feels cumbersome to define a consonant class. Is there a more elegant and more concise way?
We can use str_count on the words after splitting the 'turns' at the spaces
library(stringr)
lapply(strsplit(turns, "\\s+"), function(x) x[str_count(x, '[aeiou]') == 1])
-output
#[[1]]
#[1] "him" "to" "stir" "him" "up" "now" "and"
#[[2]]
#[1] "when" "when" "him" "he" "on" "the"
#[[3]]
#[1] "yes" "it" "for" "a" "long"
#[[4]]
#[1] "it" "was"
You can use a PCRE regex with character classes containing double negation:
turns <- c("does him good to stir him up now and again .",
"when , when I see him he w's on the settees .",
"yes it 's been eery for a long time .",
"blissful timing , indeed it was ")
rx <- "\\b[^[:^alpha:]aeiou]*[aeiou][^[:^alpha:]aeiou]*\\b"
regmatches(turns, gregexpr(rx, turns, perl=TRUE, ignore.case=TRUE))
See the R demo online. The result is as in the question.
See the regex demo. Details:
\b - word boundary
[^[:^alpha:]aeiou]* - zero or more chars other than letters and aeiou chars
[aeiou] - a vowel
[^[:^alpha:]aeiou]* - zero or more chars other than letters and aeiou chars
\b - word boundary.
An equivalent expression:
(?i)\b[^\P{L}aeiou]*[aeiou][^\P{L}aeiou]*\b
See this regex demo. \P{L} matches any char but a letter. (?i) is equivalent of ignore.case=TRUE.
Here is a base R option using strsplit + nchar + gsub
lapply(
strsplit(turns, "\\s"),
function(v) v[nchar(gsub("[^aeiou]", "", v)) == 1]
)
which gives
[[1]]
[1] "him" "to" "stir" "him" "up" "now" "and"
[[2]]
[1] "when" "when" "him" "he" "on" "the"
[[3]]
[1] "yes" "it" "for" "a" "long"
[[4]]
[1] "it" "was"

R: Extract first two digits from nested list elements

For the following vector, I would to keep only the first two digits of each integer:
a <- c('1234 2345 345 234', '323 55432 443', '43 23345 321')
I've attempted to do this by converting the vector into a nested list using strsplit and then applying substr to the list:
a <- strsplit(a, ' ')
a <- substr(a, start = 1, stop = 2)
However, this seems to just extract eh beginning of the concatenated command:
a
[1] "c(" "c(" "c("
Ideally, I would be able to coerce the vector into the following form:
[[1]]
[1] "12" "23" "34" "23"
[[2]]
[1] "32" "55" "44"
[[3]]
[1] "43" "23" "32"
How about
lapply(strsplit(a, " "), substr, 1, 2)
this explicitly does an lapply over the results of the strsplit. This is because substr() tries to coerce your list to a character vector first (it doesn't expect a list as it's first parameter). You can see what it's looking at if you do
as.character(strsplit(a, ' '))
# [1] "c(\"1234\", \"2345\", \"345\", \"234\")" "c(\"323\", \"55432\", \"443\")"
# [3] "c(\"43\", \"23345\", \"321\")"
We can also extract the first two digits from a word boundary
library(stringr)
str_extract_all(a, "\\b\\d{2}")
#[[1]]
#[1] "12" "23" "34" "23"
#[[2]]
#[1] "32" "55" "44"
#[[3]]
#[1] "43" "23" "32"

R: Calling objects within character string

> foo <- as.character(c(0, 2))
> foo
[1] "0" "2"
> foo[1]
[1] "0"
> foo[2]
[1] "2"
> as.character("0-2")
[1] "0-2" #this is the output I want from the command below:
> as.character("foo[1]-foo[2]")
[1] "foo[1]-foo[2]" # ... was hoping to get "0-2"
I tried some variations of eval(parse()), but same problem. I also tried these simple examples:
> as.character("as.name(foo[1])")
[1] "as.name(foo[1])"
> as.character(as.name("foo[1]"))
[1] "foo[1]"
Any chance of getting something simple like as.character("foo[1]-foo[2]") to display "0-2"?
UPDATE
Similar example (with a much longer string):
> lol <- as.character(seq(0, 20, 2))
> lol
[1] "0" "2" "4" "6" "8" "10" "12" "14" "16" "18" "20"
> c(as.character("0-2"), as.character("2-4"), as.character("4-6"), as.character("6-8"), as.character("8-10"), as.character("10-12"), as.character("12-14"),as.character("14-16"),as.character("16-18"),as.character("18-20"))
[1] "0-2" "2-4" "4-6" "6-8" "8-10" "10-12" "12-14" "14-16" "16-18" "18-20"
I would like to be able to actually call the object lol from within my character string.
We can use paste with the collapse argument
paste(foo, collapse='-')
#[1] "0-2"
If we need to paste adjacent elements together, remove the first and last elements of 'lol' and then paste it together with the sep argument.
paste(lol[-length(lol)], lol[-1], sep='-')
#[1] "0-2" "2-4" "4-6" "6-8" "8-10" "10-12" "12-14" "14-16" "16-18"
#[10] "18-20"

Split a character string by the symbol "*"

> test = "23*45"
I'd like to split testby the symbol *
I tried...
> strsplit(test,'*')
and I got...
[[1]]
[1] "2" "3" "*" "4" "5"
What I aim to have is:
[[1]]
[1] "23" "45"
You need to escape the star...
test = "23*45"
strsplit( test , "\\*" )
#[[1]]
#[1] "23" "45"
The split is a regular expression and * means the preceeding item is matched zero or more times. You are splitting on nothing , i.e. splitting into individual characters, as noted in the Details section of strsplit(). \\* means *treat * as a literal *.
Alternatively use the fixed argument...
strsplit( test , "*" , fixed = TRUE )
#[[1]]
#[1] "23" "45"
Which gets R to treat the split pattern as literal and not a regular expression.
You might want to look at this package:
http://www.rexamine.com/resources/stringi/
To install this package simply run:
install.packages("stringi")
Example:
stri_split_fixed(test, "*")

What 1-2 letter object names conflict with existing R objects?

To make my code more readable, I like to avoid names of objects that already exist when creating new objects. Because of the package-based nature of R, and because functions are first-class objects, it can be easy to overwrite common functions that are not in base R (since a common package might use a short function name but without knowing what package to load there is no way to check for it). Objects such as the built-in logicals T and F also cause trouble.
Some examples that come to mind are:
One letter
c
t
T/F
J
Two letters
df
A better solution might be to avoid using short names altogether in favor of more descriptive ones, and I generally try to do that as a matter of habit. Yet "df" for a function which manipulates a generic data.frame is plenty descriptive and a longer name adds little, so short names have their uses. In addition, for SO questions where the larger context isn't necessarily known, coming up with descriptive names is well-nigh impossible.
What other one- and two-letter variable names conflict with existing R objects? Which among those are sufficiently common that they should be avoided? If they are not in base, please list the package as well. The best answers will involve at least some code; please provide it if used.
Note that I am not asking whether or not overwriting functions that already exist is advisable or not. That question is addressed on SO already:
In R, what exactly is the problem with having variables with the same name as base R functions?
For visualizations of some answers here, see this question on CV:
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/13999/visualizing-2-letter-combinations
apropos is ideal for this:
apropos("^[[:alpha:]]{1,2}$")
With no packages loaded, this returns:
[1] "ar" "as" "by" "c" "C" "cm" "D" "de" "df" "dt" "el" "F" "gc" "gl"
[15] "I" "if" "Im" "is" "lh" "lm" "ls" "pf" "pi" "pt" "q" "qf" "qr" "qt"
[29] "Re" "rf" "rm" "rt" "sd" "t" "T" "ts" "vi"
The exact contents will depend upon the search list. Try loading a few packages and re-running it if you care about conflicts with packages that you commonly use.
I loaded all the (>200) packages installed on my machine with this:
lapply(rownames(installed.packages()), require, character.only = TRUE)
And reran the call to apropos, wrapping it in unique, since there were a few duplicates.
one_or_two <- unique(apropos("^[[:alpha:]]{1,2}$"))
This returned:
[1] "Ad" "am" "ar" "as" "bc" "bd" "bp" "br" "BR" "bs" "by" "c" "C"
[14] "cc" "cd" "ch" "ci" "CJ" "ck" "Cl" "cm" "cn" "cq" "cs" "Cs" "cv"
[27] "d" "D" "dc" "dd" "de" "df" "dg" "dn" "do" "ds" "dt" "e" "E"
[40] "el" "ES" "F" "FF" "fn" "gc" "gl" "go" "H" "Hi" "hm" "I" "ic"
[53] "id" "ID" "if" "IJ" "Im" "In" "ip" "is" "J" "lh" "ll" "lm" "lo"
[66] "Lo" "ls" "lu" "m" "MH" "mn" "ms" "N" "nc" "nd" "nn" "ns" "on"
[79] "Op" "P" "pa" "pf" "pi" "Pi" "pm" "pp" "ps" "pt" "q" "qf" "qq"
[92] "qr" "qt" "r" "Re" "rf" "rk" "rl" "rm" "rt" "s" "sc" "sd" "SJ"
[105] "sn" "sp" "ss" "t" "T" "te" "tr" "ts" "tt" "tz" "ug" "UG" "UN"
[118] "V" "VA" "Vd" "vi" "Vo" "w" "W" "y"
You can see where they came from with
lapply(one_or_two, find)
Been thinking about this more. Here's a list of one-letter object names in base R:
> var.names <- c(letters,LETTERS)
> var.names[sapply(var.names,exists)]
[1] "c" "q" "t" "C" "D" "F" "I" "T" "X"
And one- and two-letter object names in base R:
one.letter.names <- c(letters,LETTERS)
N <- length(one.letter.names)
first <- rep(one.letter.names,N)
second <- rep(one.letter.names,each=N)
two.letter.names <- paste(first,second,sep="")
var.names <- c(one.letter.names,two.letter.names)
> var.names[sapply(var.names,exists)]
[1] "c" "d" "q" "t" "C" "D" "F" "I" "J" "N" "T" "X" "bc" "gc"
[15] "id" "sd" "de" "Re" "df" "if" "pf" "qf" "rf" "lh" "pi" "vi" "el" "gl"
[29] "ll" "cm" "lm" "rm" "Im" "sp" "qq" "ar" "qr" "tr" "as" "bs" "is" "ls"
[43] "ns" "ps" "ts" "dt" "pt" "qt" "rt" "tt" "by" "VA" "UN"
That's a much bigger list than I initially suspected, although I would never think of naming a variable "if", so to a certain degree it makes sense.
Still doesn't capture object names not in base, or give any sense of which functions are best avoided. I think a better answer would either use expert opinion to figure out which functions are important (e.g. using c is probably worse than using qf) or use a data mining approach on a bunch of R code to see what short-named functions get used the most.

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