Using values from a dataframe to apply a function to a vector - r

Question

I'll start off by admitting that I'm terrible at the apply functions, and function writing in general, in R. I am working on a course project to clean and model some text data, and I would like to include a step that cleans up contractions.
The qdapDictionaries package includes a contractions data frame with two columns, the first column is the contraction and the second is the expanded version. For example:
contraction expanded
5 aren't are not
I want to use the values in here to run a gsub function on my text, which I still have in a large character element. Something like gsub(contr,expd,text).
Here's an example vector that I am using to test things out:
vct <- c("I've got a problem","it shouldn't be that hard","I'm having trouble 'cause I'm dumb")
I'm stumped on how to loop through the data frame (without actually writing a loop, because it seems like the least efficient way to do it) so I can run all the gsubs that I need.
There's probably a simple answer, but here's what I tried: first, I created a function that would return the expanded version if passed a contraction:
expand <- function(contr) {
expd <- contractions[which(contractions[1]==contr),2]
}
I can use sapply with this and it does work, more or less; looping over the first column in contractions, sapply(contractions[,1],expand) returns a named vector of characters with the expanded phrases.
I can't figure out how to combine this vector with gsub though. I tried writing a second function gsub_expand and changing the expand function to return both the contraction and the expansion:
gsub_expand <- function(list, text) {
text <- gsub(list[[1]],list[[2]],text)
return(text)
}
When I ran gsub_expand(sapply(contractions[,1],expand),vct) it only corrected a portion of my vector.
[1] "I've got a problem" "it shouldn't be that hard" "I'm having trouble because I'm dumb"
The first entry in the contractions data frame is 'cause and because, so the interior sapply doesn't seem to actually be looping. I'm stuck in the logic of what I want to pass to what, and what I'm supposed to loop over.
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Two options:
stringr::str_replace_all
The stringr package does mostly the same things you can do with base regex functions, but sometimes in a dramatically simpler way. This is one of those times. You can pass str_replace_all a named list or character vector, and it will use the names as patterns and the values as replacements, so all you need is
library(stringr)
contractions <- c("I've" = 'I have', "shouldn't" = 'should not', "I'm" = 'I am')
str_replace_all(vct, contractions)
and you get
[1] "I have got a problem" "it should not be that hard"
[3] "I am having trouble 'cause I am dumb"
No muss, no fuss, just works.
lapply/mapply/Map and gsub
You can, of course, use lapply or a for loop to repeat gsub. You can formulate this call in a few ways, depending on how your data is stored, and how you want to get it out. Let's first make a copy of vct, because we're going to overwrite it:
vct2 <- vct
Now we can use any of these three:
lapply(1:length(contractions),
function(x){vct2 <<- gsub(names(contractions[x]), contractions[x], vct2)})
# `mapply` is a multivariate version of `sapply`
mapply(function(x, y){vct2 <<- gsub(x, y, vct2)}, names(contractions), contractions)
# `Map` is a multivariate version of `lapply`
Map(function(x, y){vct2 <<- gsub(x, y, vct2)}, names(contractions), contractions)
each of which will return slightly different useless data, but will also save the changes to vct2, which now looks the same as the results of str_replace_all above.
These are a little complicated, mostly because you need to save the internal version of vct as you go with each change made. The vct <<- writes to the initialized vct2 outside the function's environment, allowing us to capture the successive changes. Be a little careful with <<-; it's powerful. See ?assignOps for more info.