I have two related questions regarding regular expressions in R:
[1]
I would like to convert sub-strings, containing punctuation followed by a letter, to an upper case letter.
Example:
Dr_dre to: DrDre
Captain.Spock to: CaptainSpock
spider-man to: spiderMan
[2]
I would like convert camel case strings to lower case strings with underscore delimiter.
Example:
EndOfFile to: End_of_file
CamelCase to: Camel_Case
ABC to: A_B_C
Thanks much,
Kamashay
We can use sub. We match one or more punctuation characters ([[:punct:]]+) followed by a single character which is captured as a group ((.)). In the replacement, the backreference for the capture group (\\1) is changed to upper case (\\U).
sub("[[:punct:]]+(.)", "\\U\\1", str1, perl = TRUE)
#[1] "DrDre" "CaptainSpock" "spiderMan"
For the second case, we use regex lookarounds i.e. match a letter ((?<=[A-Za-z])) followed by a capital letter and replace with _.
gsub("(?<=[A-Za-z])(?=[A-Z])", "_", str2, perl = TRUE)
#[1] "End_Of_File" "Camel_Case" "A_B_C"
data
str1 <- c("Dr_dre", "Captain.Spock", "spider-man")
str2 <- c("EndOfFile", "CamelCase", "ABC")
Related
I want to replace a string with "s" with "'s_" but only if it has more than one letter to start with.
e.g
If the input is "john_s_fingerprinting", the output should be "john's_fingerprinting". But if the input is "j_s_fingerprinting" then its should not change.
I have tried regex to match that strictly more than one letter criteria but having issue with replacement regex.
Here is what I have so far
gsub("[a-z]{2,}_s_", "[a-z]{2,}'s_", "john_s_fingerprinting")
The replacement "[a-z]{2,}'s_" is not giving me the correct output
We may need to capture as group and replace with backreference (\\1) of the captured group
gsub("([A-Za-z]{2,})_s", "\\1's", str1)
-output
[1] "john's_fingerprinting" "j_s_fingerprinting"
Or another option is a regex lookaround
gsub("(?<=[A-Za-z]{2})_s", "'s", str1, perl = TRUE)
[1] "john's_fingerprinting" "j_s_fingerprinting"
data
str1 <- c("john_s_fingerprinting", "j_s_fingerprinting")
I have the string in R
BLCU142-09|Apodemia_mejicanus
and I would like to get the result
Apodemia_mejicanus
Using the stringr R package, I have tried
str_replace_all("BLCU142-09|Apodemia_mejicanus", "[[A-Z0-9|-]]", "")
# [1] "podemia_mejicanus"
which is almost what I need, except that the A is missing.
You can use
sub(".*\\|", "", x)
This will remove all text up to and including the last pipe char. See the regex demo. Details:
.* - any zero or more chars as many as possible
\| - a | char (| is a special regex metacharacter that is an alternation operator, so it must be escaped, and since string literals in R can contain string escape sequences, the | is escaped with a double backslash).
See the R demo online:
x <- c("BLCU142-09|Apodemia_mejicanus", "a|b|c|BLCU142-09|Apodemia_mejicanus")
sub(".*\\|", "", x)
## => [1] "Apodemia_mejicanus" "Apodemia_mejicanus"
We can match one or more characters that are not a | ([^|]+) from the start (^) of the string followed by | in str_remove to remove that substring
library(stringr)
str_remove(str1, "^[^|]+\\|")
#[1] "Apodemia_mejicanus"
If we use [A-Z] also to match it will match the upper case letter and replace with blank ("") as in the OP's str_replace_all
data
str1 <- "BLCU142-09|Apodemia_mejicanus"
You can always choose to _extract rather than _remove:
s <- "BLCU142-09|Apodemia_mejicanus"
stringr::str_extract(s,"[[:alpha:]_]+$")
## [1] "Apodemia_mejicanus"
Depending on how permissive you want to be, you could also use [[:alpha:]]+_[[:alpha:]]+ as your target.
I would keep it simple:
substring(my_string, regexpr("|", my_string, fixed = TRUE) + 1L)
I have a string which looks like this:
something-------another--thing
I want to replace the multiple dashes with a single one.
So the expected output would be:
something-another-thing
We can try using sub here:
x <- "something-------another--thing"
gsub("-{2,}", "-", x)
[1] "something-another-thing"
More generally, if we want to replace any sequence of two or more of the same character with just the single character, then use this version:
x <- "something-------another--thing"
gsub("(.)\\1+", "\\1", x)
The second pattern could use an explanation:
(.) match AND capture any single letter
\\1+ then match the same letter, at least one or possibly more times
Then, we replace with just the single captured letter.
you can do it with gsub and using regex.
> text='something-------another--thing'
> gsub('-{2,}','-',text)
[1] "something-another-thing"
t2 <- "something-------another--thing"
library(stringr)
str_replace_all(t2, pattern = "-+", replacement = "-")
which gives:
[1] "something-another-thing"
If you're searching for the right regex to search for a string, you can test it out here https://regexr.com/
In the above, you're just searching for a pattern that is a hyphen, so pattern = "-", but we add the plus so that the search is 'greedy' and can include many hyphens, so we get pattern = "-+"
How can I change #ManuelaSchwesig#sigmargabriel#nahles into #ManuelaSchwesig, #sigmargabriel, #nahles using R?
We could try with a regex lookaround by splitting at the junction of a lower case letter and the # character to create a vector of strings. Here, the pattern for strsplit is a positive regex lookbehind ((?<=[a-z])) followed by a positive regex lookahead ((?=#)). In the string, there are two instances where it matches i.e. between g and # (Schweig#sigma) and l and # in (gabriel#nahles) and splits between these characters
strsplit(str1, "(?<=[a-z])(?=#)", perl = TRUE)[[1]]
#[1] "#ManuelaSchwesig" "#sigmargabriel" "#nahles"
If we need to keep it as a single string and the objective is to insert a ,
gsub("([a-z])#", "\\1,#", str1)
#[1] "#ManuelaSchwesig,#sigmargabriel,#nahles"
data
str1 <- "#ManuelaSchwesig#sigmargabriel#nahles"
Here are some examples from my data:
a <-c("sp|Q9Y6W5|","sp|Q9HB90|,sp|Q9NQL2|","orf|NCBIAAYI_c_1_1023|",
"orf|NCBIACEN_c_10_906|,orf|NCBIACEO_c_5_1142|",
"orf|NCBIAAYI_c_258|,orf|aot172_c_6_302|,orf|aot180_c_2_405|")
For a: The individual strings can contain even more entries of "sp|" and "orf"
The results have to be like this:
[1] "sp|Q9Y6W5" "sp|Q9HB90,sp|Q9NQL2" "orf|NCBIAAYI_c_1_1023"
"orf|NCBIACEN_c_10_906,orf|NCBIACEO_c_5_1142"
"orf|NCBIAAYI_c_258,orf|aot172_c_6_302,orf|aot180_c_2_405"
So the aim is to remove the last "|" for each "sp|" and "orf|" entry. It seems that "|" is a special challenge because it is a metacharacter in regular expressions. Furthermore, the length and composition of the "orf|" entries varying a lot. The only things they have in common is "orf|" or "sp|" at the beginning and that "|" is on the last position. I tried different things with gsub() but also with the stringr package or regexpr() or [:punct:], but nothing really worked. Maybe it was just the wrong combination.
We can use gsub to match the | that is followed by a , or is at the end ($) of the string and replace with blank ("")
gsub("[|](?=(,|$))", "", a, perl = TRUE)
#[1] "sp|Q9Y6W5"
#[2] "sp|Q9HB90,sp|Q9NQL2"
#[3] "orf|NCBIAAYI_c_1_1023"
#[4] "orf|NCBIACEN_c_10_906,orf|NCBIACEO_c_5_1142"
#[5] "orf|NCBIAAYI_c_258,orf|aot172_c_6_302,orf|aot180_c_2_405"
Or we split by ,', remove the last character withsubstr, andpastethelist` elements together
sapply(strsplit(a, ","), function(x) paste(substr(x, 1, nchar(x)-1), collapse=","))
An easy alternative that might work. You need to escape the "|" using "\\|".
# Input
a <-c("sp|Q9Y6W5|","sp|Q9HB90|,sp|Q9NQL2|","orf|NCBIAAYI_c_1_1023|",
"orf|NCBIACEN_c_10_906|,orf|NCBIACEO_c_5_1142|",
"orf|NCBIAAYI_c_258|,orf|aot172_c_6_302|,orf|aot180_c_2_405|")
# Expected output
b <- c("sp|Q9Y6W5", "sp|Q9HB90,sp|Q9NQL2", "orf|NCBIAAYI_c_1_1023" ,
"orf|NCBIACEN_c_10_906,orf|NCBIACEO_c_5_1142" ,
"orf|NCBIAAYI_c_258,orf|aot172_c_6_302,orf|aot180_c_2_405")
res <- gsub("\\|,", ",", gsub("\\|$", "", a))
all(res == b)
#[1] TRUE
You could construct a single regex call to gsub, but this is simple and easy to understand. The inner gsub looks for | and the end of the string and removes it. The outer gsub looks for ,| and replaces with ,.
You do not have to use a PCRE regex here as all you need can be done with the default TRE regex (if you specify perl=TRUE, the pattern is compiled with a PCRE regex engine and is sometimes slower than TRE default regex engine).
Here is the single simple gsub call:
gsub("\\|(,|$)", "\\1", a)
See the online R demo. No lookarounds are really necessary, as you see.
Pattern details
\\| - a literal | symbol (because if you do not escape it or put into a bracket expression it will denote an alternation operator, see the line below)
(,|$) - a capturing group (referenced to with \1 from the replacement pattern) matching either of the two alternatives:
, - a comma
| - or (the alternation operator)
$ - end of string anchor.
The \1 in the replacement string tells the regex engine to insert the contents stored in the capturing group #1 back into the resulting string (so, the commas are restored that way where necessary).