Using regular expression in string replacement - r

Question

I have a broken csv file that I am attempting to read into R and repair using a regular expression.
The reason it is broken is that it contains some fields which include a comma but does not wrap those fields in double quotes. So I have to use a regular expression to find these fields, and wrap them in double quotes.
Here is an example of the data source:
DataField1,DataField2,Price
ID1,Value1,
ID2,Value2,$500.00
ID3,Value3,$1,250.00
So you can see that in the third row, the Price field contains a comma but it is not wrapped in double quotes. This breaks the read.table function.
My approach is to use readLines and str_replace_all to wrap the price with commas in double quotes. But I am not good at regular expressions and stuck.
vector <- read.Lines(file)
vector_temp <- str_replace_all(vector, ",\\$[0-9]+,\\d{3}\\.\\d{2}", ",\"\\$[0-9]+,\\d{3}\\.\\d{2}\"")
I want the output to be:
DataField1,DataField2,Price
ID1,Value1,
ID2,Value2,$500.00
ID3,Value3,"$1,250.00"
With this format, I can read into R.
Appreciate any help!

Answer 1

lines <- readLines(textConnection(object="DataField1,DataField2,Price
ID1,Value1,
ID2,Value2,$500.00
ID3,Value3,$1,250.00"))
library(stringi)
library(tidyverse)
stri_split_regex(lines, ",", n=3, simplify=TRUE) %>%
as_data_frame() %>%
docxtractr::assign_colnames(1)
## DataField1 DataField2 Price
## 1 ID1 Value1
## 2 ID2 Value2 $500.00
## 3 ID3 Value3 $1,250.00
from there you can readr::write_csv() or write.csv()

Answer 2

The extra facilities in the stringi or stringr packages do not seem needed. gsub seems perfectly suited for this. You just need understand about capture-groups with paired parentheses (brackets to Brits) and the use of the double-backslash_n convention for referring to capture-group matches in the replacement argument:
txt <- "DataField1,DataField2,Price, extra
ID1,Value1, ,
ID2,Value2,$500.00,
ID3,Value3,$1,250.00, o"
vector<- gsub("([$][0-9]{1,3}([,]([0-9]{3})){0,10}([.][0-9]{0,2}))" , "\"\\1\"", readLines(textConnection(txt)) )
> read.csv(text=vector)
DataField1 DataField2 Price extra
1 ID1 Value1
2 ID2 Value2 $500.00
3 ID3 Value3 $1,250.00 o
You are putting quotes around specific sequence of digits possibly repeated(commas digits) and possible period and 2 digits . There might be earlier SO questions about formatting as "currency".

Answer 3

Here are some solutions:
1) read.pattern This uses read.pattern in the gsubfn package to read in a file (assumed to be called sc.csv) such that the capture groups, i.e. the parenthesized portions, of the pattern are the fields. This will read in the file and process it all in one step so it is not necessary to use readLines first.
^(.*?), that begins the pattern will match everything from the start until the first comma. Then (.*?), will match to the next comma and finally (.*)$ will match everything else to the end. Normally * is greedy, i.e. it matches as much as it can, but the question mark after it makes it ungreedy. We needed to specify perl=TRUE so that it uses perl regular expressions since by default gsubfn uses tcl regular expressions based on Henry Spencer's regex parser which does not support *? . If you would rather have character columns instead of factor then add the as.is=TRUE argument to read.pattern.
The final line of code removes the $ and , characters from the Price column and converts it to numeric. (Omit this line if you actually want it formatted.)
library(gsubfn)
DF <- read.pattern("sc.csv", pattern = "^(.*?),(.*?),(.*)$", perl = TRUE, header = TRUE)
DF$Price <- as.numeric(gsub("[$,]", "", DF$Price)) ##
giving:
> DF
DataField1 DataField2 Price
1 ID1 Value1 NA
2 ID2 Value2 500
3 ID3 Value3 1250
2) sub This uses very simple regular expression (just a single character match) and no packages. Using vector as defined in the question this replaces the first two commas with semicolons. Then it can be read in using sep = ";"
read.table(text = sub(",", ";", sub(",", ";", vector)), header = TRUE, sep = ";")
Add the line marked ## in (1) if you want numeric prices.