- 1 TL;DR
- 2 Introduction
- 3 Regular expressions
- 4 Detecting pattern matches with
str_detect(),str_which(),str_count(), andstr_locate(). - 5 Subsetting strings & data frames with
str_subset(),str_sub(),str_match(), &str_extract(). - 6 Combining and splitting strings using
str_c(),str_flatten(),str_split(), &str_glue(). - 7 Manage the lengths of strings using
str_length(),str_pad(),str_trunc(), &str_trim() - 8 Mutating strings with
str_sub(),str_replace(),str_replace_all(),str_remove(), &str_remove_all() - 9 You can modify the case of a string using
str_to_lower(),str_to_upper(),str_to_title(), &str_to_sentence() - 10 Example application: Using
str_detect()orstr_which()to subset with data frames - 11 Navigation
- 12 Notes
1 TL;DR
Being able to work with character strings is an essential skill in data analysis and science. In this post we’ll learn a few of the ways in which the stringr package and regular expressions (AKA “regex” or “regexps”) makes working with strings in R considerably easier.
2 Introduction
The 7th post of the Scientist’s Guide to R series is all about showing you how to work with strings in R, using the intuitive stringr package from the tidyverse. You’ll also learn about regular expressions, which allow you to use concisely specified patterns to search, subset, and modify strings. This is quite a large topic, so for this post I’ll focus on some of the more common operations that I’ve had to use in my work as an academic researcher and data scientist. Usually, this means working with strings vectors that are columns in data frames or the names of the columns in a data frame (which you may recall we can get with the base R names() function). Specifically, we’ll consider:
What regular expressions are and how to use them.
Detecting, locating, and counting pattern matches with
str_detect(),str_which(),str_locate(), &str_count().Subset strings with
str_subset(),str_sub(), &str_extract().Combining and splitting strings using
str_c(),str_flatten(),str_split(), &str_glue().Manage lengths of strings with
str_length(),str_pad(),str_trunc(), &str_trim().Mutate strings using
str_sub(),str_replace(), &str_remove().Alter the case of strings with
str_to_lower(),str_to_upper(), &str_to_title().
Note: as usual, at this point in the blog series I’ll assume you’re familiar with the pipe operator (%>%). To refresh your memory or if you’re reading about the pipe operator for the 1st time, see this section of an earlier post.
3 Regular expressions
Regular expressions, or “regexps” for short, are a powerful way to work with patterns in strings. Becoming familiar with regexps is well worth the effort in the time they will save you. Regex allows you to match patterns in strings using a set of special characters that tell regexps-supported functions in R how to concisely describe the pattern in question. You can learn more about regular expressions here, here, and here. I won’t be using all of these in the subsequent demonstrations of the stringr functions (to keep things simple), but listing the majority of the available options will be useful as future reference for us to use in constructing regexps.
In this post we’ll focus on some of the most common special chararcters you’ll need, specifically (special character = definition):
Basics:
^= start of a string$= end of a string.= any character[:digit:]= any digit (use an extra set of square brackets for base R functions that accept regexps)[:alpha:]= any letter[:alnum:]= letters and/or numbers[:punct:]= punctuation characters[:graph:]= letters, numbers, and punctuation characters[:lower:]= lowercase letters only[:upper:]= uppercase letters only[:space:]= empty spaces[:blank:]= empty spaces or tabs
Quantifiers These are useful when you want to match a pattern a specific number of times (based on the preceding character in the regexp):
*= matches the preceding character any number of times+= matches the preceding character once?= matches the predecing character at most once (i.e. optionally){n}= matches the preceding character exactly n times{n, }= n or more times{n, m}= between n & m times
Alternatives & look-arounds are useful for matching patterns more flexibly:
|= or (just like the base R logical operator), e.g. the regexp “apples|oranges” would look for apples or oranges[abc]= one of a, b, or c (or whatever else you put within the [ ])[t-z]= a letter from t to z[^abc]= anything other than a, b, or c(?=)= look ahead, e.g.i(?=e)= i when it comes before e(?!)= negative look ahead, e.g.i(?!e)i when it comes before something that isn’t e(?<)= look behind, e.g.(?<=e)i= i when it follows e(?<!)= negative look behind, e.g.(?<!e)i= i when it does not follow e
Capturing pattern groups
Parentheses can be used to specify the order of evaluation (as for mathematical expressions) and to capture groups or components of regexps. After defining pattern groups this way, you can refer to the groups using “\\n”, where n is the group number, assigned to groups in the regexp in order from left to right. The most common reason you would want to do this is to replace patterns using str_replace() or str_replace_all(), as will be demonstrated below in the section on mutating strings.
Escaping characters
What if you want to search for a literal “.” or “$” rather than use the special regexp characters for “any character” or “the end of a string”. This can be accomplished by escaping the character, which simply means putting one or more backslashes “\” in front of it1. So to search for a literal period, “.”, you could use “\\.”
Aside from the characters above, most of the rest of a regexp will consist of the literal text you want to match. For example, the regexp “^[Ss]un.*” when applied to a string vector of the days of the week, would match entries for “Sunday” or “sunday” since these entries start with (^) an “S” or an “s”, followed by the literal characters “un”, then any character (“.”) repeated any number of times (asterisk).
4 Detecting pattern matches with str_detect(), str_which(), str_count(), and str_locate().
To use any of the stringr functions, we 1st need to load the stringr package via the library() function
library(tidyverse) #note: stringr is installed and loaded with the tidyverse## Warning: package 'ggplot2' was built under R version 4.0.5## Warning: package 'tibble' was built under R version 4.0.5We’ll start exploring the uses of some of these special characters with some basic regexps by submitting them to the pattern arguments (2nd argument) of str_detect(), str_which(), str_count(), and str_locate()
str_detect() finds matches for a regexp and returns a logical vector that is TRUE for matching entries, and FALSE for non-matching entries.
#1st we'll construct a vector of weekdays, repeated 10 times
days <- rep(c("Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday",
"Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday", "Sunday"), 3)
#note that stringr also has a function called str_dup() which can be used to
#replicate/duplicate string values.
str_detect(days, "^[Ss]un.*") #every 7th entry is a match## [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE
## [13] FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE#in this case, since Su appears uniquely for the Sunday entries, we could also
#just use "Su" for the regexp
identical(str_detect(days, "Su"), str_detect(days, "^[Ss]un.*"))## [1] TRUE#str_detect() is the tidyverse equivalent to the grepl() function in base R
identical(grepl("Su", days), str_detect(days, "Su"))## [1] TRUE#the main advantages of str_detect() are that the string is the 1st argument
#(i.e. it is pipe friendly), and there many of the stringr functions also have a
#"negate" option which allows you to look for non-matching entries instead of
#matching entries, e.g.
days %>% str_detect("Su", negate = T) #find non-matches instead of matches## [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
## [13] TRUE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSEstr_which() returns the indices of matches for a regexp and returns a numeric vector, i.e. it tells you which entries are matches.
days %>%
#indices of matching entries, in this case starting with a capital "M" (for "Monday")
str_which("^M") ## [1] 1 8 15days %>% str_which("^M", negate = T) #indices of non-matching entries## [1] 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 16 17 18 19 20 21#if there were non-day values in our weekday vector, we could use either of
#these functions to identify the unusual values, e.g.
#replace 10 randomly selected values with a non-weekday entry, like a "day off"
#of work... which can happen irregularly if you're a grad student ;) lol
days[sample(1:70, 10)] <- "day off"
#find the indices of the entries which do not end in "day", i.e. the indices of the days off
days %>% str_which("day$", negate = T)## [1] 7 10 19 20 32 36 39 42 61 68#as you can see, this is useful for checking for unusual values which may be
#data entry/coding errors.
#example of the "or" operator in a regular expression
str_which(days, "(Monday|Tuesday)") #indices for entries containing either "Monday" or "Tuesday"## [1] 1 2 8 9 15 16#which entries contain an empty space (the "day off" ones)?
str_which(days, "[:space:]{1}") #match entries containing a single {1} space [:space:]## [1] 7 10 19 20 32 36 39 42 61 68str_locate() or str_locate_all() tell you the character positions the pattern characters are found in. I haven’t needed to use them so far.
days %>%
str_locate("day") %>% #this tells us the starting and ending positions of the pattern "day"
head() #only print the 1st 6 rows of the output## start end
## [1,] 4 6
## [2,] 5 7
## [3,] 7 9
## [4,] 6 8
## [5,] 4 6
## [6,] 6 8#if someone else provided us with the days vector and expected it to only
#contain entries for days of the week, all of these values should have start
#values greater than 1.
#str_locate() will return the starting and stopping positions of the FIRST match
#only, if you want the positions of all matches, use str_locate_all() instead.str_count() tells you how many times a pattern appears in each entry of a string/character vector. This might be most useful for checking for unexpected duplications of values when cleaning data or for extracting data from unstructured text (e.g. quantifying the number of times a specific keyword appears in an interview transcript).
days %>% str_count("e") #number of times the letter "e" appears in each entry## [1] 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 NA NA NA NA
## [26] NA NA NA NA NA NA 0 NA NA NA 0 NA NA 0 NA NA 0 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
## [51] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA 0 NA NA NA NA NA NA 05 Subsetting strings & data frames with str_subset(), str_sub(), str_match(), & str_extract().
For the remainer of this post we’ll work with the gapminder data, which you may recall from earlier posts contains data on life expectancy, population, and GDP per capita for 142 countries.
library(gapminder) #load the gapminder package containing the gapminder data
gapminder %>% glimpse() #show the structure of a data frame using dplyr::glimpse()## Rows: 1,704
## Columns: 6
## $ country <fct> "Afghanistan", "Afghanistan", "Afghanistan", "Afghanistan", ~
## $ continent <fct> Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, Asia, ~
## $ year <int> 1952, 1957, 1962, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, ~
## $ lifeExp <dbl> 28.801, 30.332, 31.997, 34.020, 36.088, 38.438, 39.854, 40.8~
## $ pop <int> 8425333, 9240934, 10267083, 11537966, 13079460, 14880372, 12~
## $ gdpPercap <dbl> 779.4453, 820.8530, 853.1007, 836.1971, 739.9811, 786.1134, ~One of the first things we learned about was how to use “patterns” with numeric vectors via base R logical comparison operators like >, <, <=, or >=. The str_subset(), str_sub(), str_match(), & str_extract() from stringr help us subset strings2
str_subset() returns all values in a vector which match a pattern. We could use it to figure out which countries in the gapminder data begin with an A or C and also end with an A or C.
subsetted_country_names <- gapminder$country %>%
unique() %>% #just get the unique() values to drop duplicates for a vector
str_subset("^[AC].*a$")
#above pattern = starts with (^) an A or C ([AC]), then anything (.) repeated
#any number of times (*), then a lower case "a" at the end ($).
subsetted_country_names %>% head()## [1] "Albania" "Algeria" "Angola" "Argentina" "Australia" "Austria"#A tidyverse-only alternative to the $ symbol for "pulling" a variable from a
#data frame is the pull() function
gapminder %>%
pull(country) %>%
unique() %>%
str_subset("^[AC].*a$") %>%
identical(subsetted_country_names)## [1] TRUEYou may recall that this behaviour is similar to the matches() “tidy-select” helper function that you can use to select() columns with dplyr (which was loaded as one of the tidyverse packages). For example,
gap_c_cols <- gapminder %>% select(matches("^c"))
gap_c_cols %>%
head() #only print the 1st 6 rows## # A tibble: 6 x 2
## country continent
## <fct> <fct>
## 1 Afghanistan Asia
## 2 Afghanistan Asia
## 3 Afghanistan Asia
## 4 Afghanistan Asia
## 5 Afghanistan Asia
## 6 Afghanistan Asiais equivalent to
c_names <- gapminder %>% names() %>% str_subset("^c")
all.equal(
#recall that we can subset columns with a character vector of names
gapminder[, c_names],
gap_c_cols #compare to the select(matches()) version
)## [1] TRUE#more on stringr for subsetting data frames later...While, I don’t expect anyone to use str_subset() and [] instead of dplyr::select() & tidyselect::matches(), the take home message here is that the fact that the column names of a data frame are also a string vector means that you can use stringr functions to work with them.
str_sub() extracts parts of strings based on their position with the start and end arguments
gap_names <- gapminder %>% names
gap_names %>% str_sub(start = 1, end = 6) #return the 1st 6 characters of each column name## [1] "countr" "contin" "year" "lifeEx" "pop" "gdpPer"gap_names %>% str_sub(start = -3, end = -1) #return the last 3 characters of each column name## [1] "try" "ent" "ear" "Exp" "pop" "cap"str_extract() is useful if you want to extract just the part of the string matching the specified regex instead of the entire entry as would be returned by str_subset(). For example, if you have some data on names and phone numbers in the same column, you might want to extract just the phone number or name portions.
x <- c("Bob: 250-999-8888", "Emily: 416-908-2004", "Roger: 204-192-9879", "Lindsay: 250-209-3047")
#extract just the phone numbers using a regex that detects 3 numbers followed by
#a dash, then 3 numbers, another dash, then 4 numbers
str_extract(x, "[:digit:]{3}-[:digit:]{3}-[:digit:]{4}") ## [1] "250-999-8888" "416-908-2004" "204-192-9879" "250-209-3047"#extract just the names with a regex that matches a sequence of letters "[:alpha:]"
#of arbitrary length "*"
str_extract(x, "[:alpha:]*") ## [1] "Bob" "Emily" "Roger" "Lindsay"It is worth mentioning that within each entry of the string vector str_extract() will pull the first set of values matching the specified pattern, so in the example above, if we had first and last names separated by a space, we would only get the 1st one with the [:alpha:]* pattern I used. To extract all matches, we could use str_extract_all() instead.
x <- c("Bob Jones: 250-999-8888", "Emily Robins: 416-908-2004",
"Roger Smith: 204-192-9879", "Lindsay Richards: 250-209-3047")
#only returns the 1st name (the 1st match)
str_extract(x, "[:alpha:]*") ## [1] "Bob" "Emily" "Roger" "Lindsay"#str_extract_all() returns both names (all matches), but gives you a list
#(simplify = FALSE, the default) or matrix (simplify = TRUE)
str_extract_all(x, "[:alpha:]{2,}", simplify = TRUE) ## [,1] [,2]
## [1,] "Bob" "Jones"
## [2,] "Emily" "Robins"
## [3,] "Roger" "Smith"
## [4,] "Lindsay" "Richards"#here I used the {2, } quantifier for "2 or more" because the * quantifier
#returns a bunch of empty strings as well.
#alternatively, we could just pass a more complex regex to the pattern argument
#of str_extract() to look for the 1st set of letters and 2nd set of letters with
#a space between them
str_extract(x, "[:alpha:]* [:alpha:]*")## [1] "Bob Jones" "Emily Robins" "Roger Smith" "Lindsay Richards"#of course that will only work if the names are formatted consitently, e.g. no
#commas between names6 Combining and splitting strings using str_c(), str_flatten(), str_split(), & str_glue().
str_c() is very useful if you want to combine multiple strings or other vectors into a single character vector on an element-wise basis. I often use this to add an indicator string to the names of a data frame before joining it to another one to make it easy to keep track of which columns came from which data frame.
nms <- names(gapminder) #store the original names
nms <- str_c(names(gapminder), "_gap") #add _gap to the end of each column name
nms## [1] "country_gap" "continent_gap" "year_gap" "lifeExp_gap"
## [5] "pop_gap" "gdpPercap_gap"#in contrast, the c() operator from base R, would not do the combination on an
#elementwise basis and just adds "_gap" as a separate entry at the end of the
#names vector
names(gapminder) %>% c("_gap")## [1] "country" "continent" "year" "lifeExp" "pop" "gdpPercap"
## [7] "_gap"str_flatten() collapses a string vector into a single string (i.e. a character vector of length 1)
str_flatten(c("a_3", "d_54"), #vector to collapse
collapse = " ") #character(s) to insert between each piece## [1] "a_3 d_54"str_split() splits a string into a list or matrix of pieces based on a supplied pattern
str_split(c("a_3", "d_54"), pattern = "_") #pattern to use for splitting. returns a list.## [[1]]
## [1] "a" "3"
##
## [[2]]
## [1] "d" "54"str_split(c("a_3", "d_54"), pattern = "_", simplify = TRUE) #returns a matrix## [,1] [,2]
## [1,] "a" "3"
## [2,] "d" "54"str_glue() is a convenience wrapper for the glue::glue() function, which allows you to interpolate strings and values that have been assigned to names in R. To insert a value, you simply wrap it in {}:
y <- Sys.Date() #store the current date
str_glue("today is {y}")## today is 2021-05-15nm <- "Craig"
str_glue("Hi, my name is {nm}")## Hi, my name is Craiga <- 5
str_glue("a = {a}")## a = 5#the base R equivalent is the paste0 function, which requires separating the
#text and values with commas. This still accomplishes the same thing, but the
#code doesn't look quite as nice.
paste0("today is ", y)## [1] "today is 2021-05-15"7 Manage the lengths of strings using str_length(), str_pad(), str_trunc(), & str_trim()
str_length() tells you how many characters are in each entry of a character vector
names(gapminder)## [1] "country" "continent" "year" "lifeExp" "pop" "gdpPercap"str_length(names(gapminder))## [1] 7 9 4 7 3 9str_pad() standardizes the length of strings in a character vector by padding it on the left or right ends with a specified character (by default, a space)
str_pad(string = names(gapminder),
width = 9, #the minimum width of the string to fill/pad positions up to
side = "both", #the side to insert the extra characters on (left, right, or both)
pad = "_") #single character to use for padding ## [1] "_country_" "continent" "__year___" "_lifeExp_" "___pop___" "gdpPercap"str_trunc() standardizes string lengths in the opposite direction, by controlling the maximum width and truncating strings longer which are longer than this
str_trunc(string = names(gapminder),
width = 7, #the maximum width to allow for strings
side= "right",
#entries which have been truncated will show this to indicate that
#something has been removed
ellipsis = "...") ## [1] "country" "cont..." "year" "lifeExp" "pop" "gdpP..."str_trim() removes empty spaces on the ends of a string
#add some whitespace
padded_names <- names(gapminder) %>% str_pad(12, "both")
padded_names## [1] " country " " continent " " year " " lifeExp " " pop "
## [6] " gdpPercap "#remove it
str_trim(padded_names)## [1] "country" "continent" "year" "lifeExp" "pop" "gdpPercap"8 Mutating strings with str_sub(), str_replace(), str_replace_all(), str_remove(), & str_remove_all()
str_sub() can also be used to replace values based on position when combined with the assignment operator (<-)
gap_names <- gapminder %>% names
str_sub(gap_names, end = 1) <- "X_" #replace the 1st character with "X_"
gap_names ## [1] "X_ountry" "X_ontinent" "X_ear" "X_ifeExp" "X_op"
## [6] "X_dpPercap"#the main downside to this is that it modifies the original string vector, so
#you would need to recreate it if you make a mistake
gap_names <- gapminder %>% names #recreate the original gap_names vectorTo modify a copy instead, you can use str_replace() or str_replace_all(). str_replace() replaces the 1st match in each entry of the string vector, while str_repalce_all() replaces all matches. I almost always use str_replace_all() instead of str_replace().
gap_names <- gapminder %>% names
str_replace(gap_names,
pattern = "^.{3}", #match the 1st 3 characters of each string in the vector
replacement = "X_") #replace them with with "X_"## [1] "X_ntry" "X_tinent" "X_r" "X_eExp" "X_" "X_Percap"gap_names #original names vector is unaffected## [1] "country" "continent" "year" "lifeExp" "pop" "gdpPercap"countries <- unique(gapminder$country)
#replace all lower case a's with A's flanked by "_" to make it obvious what has changed
str_replace(countries,
pattern = "a",
replacement = "_A_") %>% #replace them with with "_A_"
head()## [1] "Afgh_A_nistan" "Alb_A_nia" "Algeri_A_" "Angol_A_"
## [5] "Argentin_A_" "Austr_A_lia"#replace all lower case e's with E's
countries <- str_replace_all(countries,
pattern = "e",
replacement = "E") #replace them with with "E"
countries %>% head()## [1] "Afghanistan" "Albania" "AlgEria" "Angola" "ArgEntina"
## [6] "Australia"#to delete part of a string, you can just set the replacement value to ""
underscores_removed <- str_replace_all(countries,
pattern = "_",
replacement = "") %>% head() #replace them with "", effectively deleting them
underscores_removed ## [1] "Afghanistan" "Albania" "AlgEria" "Angola" "ArgEntina"
## [6] "Australia"#a shortcut for this use of str_replace() or str_replace_all() to delete regexp
#matches are the str_remove() & str_remove_all()
str_remove_all(countries, "_") %>%
head() %>%
identical(underscores_removed)## [1] TRUE9 You can modify the case of a string using str_to_lower(), str_to_upper(), str_to_title(), & str_to_sentence()
str_to_lower("AFTER such a long HIKE in the sun, the BEER was very refreshing")## [1] "after such a long hike in the sun, the beer was very refreshing"str_to_upper("after such a long hike in the sun, the beer was very refreshing")## [1] "AFTER SUCH A LONG HIKE IN THE SUN, THE BEER WAS VERY REFRESHING"str_to_title("after such a long hike in the sun, the beer was very refreshing")## [1] "After Such A Long Hike In The Sun, The Beer Was Very Refreshing"str_to_sentence("after such a long hike in the sun, the beer was very refreshing")## [1] "After such a long hike in the sun, the beer was very refreshing"10 Example application: Using str_detect() or str_which() to subset with data frames
We saw one example of this earlier, but here are a few more. You can use these functions for subsetting because they return logical vectors or vectors of indices.
Recall from a prior post that we can subset columns or rows using vectors of indices or logical (TRUE/FALSE) values.
names(gapminder)## [1] "country" "continent" "year" "lifeExp" "pop" "gdpPercap"gapminder[, c(1, 4, 6)] %>% names() #columns 1, 4, 6## [1] "country" "lifeExp" "gdpPercap"gapminder[, c(TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE)] %>% names() #columns 1 & 3## [1] "country" "year"We can take advantage of this to select columns using a regexp via the str_detect() or str_which() functions
gap_names <- names(gapminder)
gapminder[, str_detect(gap_names, "^c")] %>% names() #columns with names starting with (^) a c## [1] "country" "continent"gapminder[, str_which(gap_names, "p$")] %>% names() #columns with names that end ($) in p## [1] "lifeExp" "pop" "gdpPercap"While it’s unlikley that you would ever do this in practice given that dplyr::select() makes it a bit easier, the same logic can be used for subsetting rows using regexps, which is something that dplyr::filter() doesn’t do on its own.
#get the indices of the rows with data for Canada or (|) Italy
CI_rows <- str_which(gapminder$country, "Canada|Italy")
CI_rows %>% head() #view the 1st 6## [1] 241 242 243 244 245 246gapminder[CI_rows, ] %>% head## # A tibble: 6 x 6
## country continent year lifeExp pop gdpPercap
## <fct> <fct> <int> <dbl> <int> <dbl>
## 1 Canada Americas 1952 68.8 14785584 11367.
## 2 Canada Americas 1957 70.0 17010154 12490.
## 3 Canada Americas 1962 71.3 18985849 13462.
## 4 Canada Americas 1967 72.1 20819767 16077.
## 5 Canada Americas 1972 72.9 22284500 18971.
## 6 Canada Americas 1977 74.2 23796400 22091.#str_detect() yields the same results
identical(gapminder[str_detect(gapminder$country, "Canada|Italy"), ],
gapminder[str_which(gapminder$country, "Canada|Italy"), ]
)## [1] TRUE#or if you prefer dplyr::filter() to the square bracket notation, use
#str_detect(), an advantage of this is that when working within filter you don't
#need to use the dataframe$variable syntax since it knows to look for the
#variable in the data frame you've piped in (gapminder)
identical(
#str_detect() combined with dplyr::filter()
gapminder %>%
filter(str_detect(country, "Canada|Italy")),
#str_detect() with [] from base R
gapminder[str_detect(gapminder$country, "Canada|Italy"), ]
)## [1] TRUEYou can see from these examples that stringr functions alone can do some of the same things that dplyr functions can, as well as building upon the functionality of some dplyr functions like filter().
Congrats! If you’ve made it here working with strings just got a whole lot easier for you…
12 Notes
If you want to up your string manipulation game even more, you can learn more from the strings chapter of R 4 data science here or the stringr package documentation on CRAN, and some base R string processing functions here.
Data scientist & skilled R developer Garrick Aden-Buie has also built an Addin for R studio, via the regexplain package that can make it easier to work with regexps, which you may find helpful.
While it is a good idea to develop some direct knowledge of regexps for simple cases like the ones we’ve explored here, the rebus and/or Regularity packages can make building complex regexps quite a bit easier and I recommend checking them out if you’ll be working with a lot of unstructured text in your research.
This isn’t something you’ll need to use often, but you can remove special characters from a string using the
iconv()function from base R.
Thank you for visiting my blog. I welcome any suggestions for future posts, comments or other feedback you might have. Feedback from beginners and science students/trainees (or with them in mind) is especially helpful in the interest of making this guide even better for them.
This blog is something I do as a volunteer in my free time. If you’ve found it helpful and want to give back, coffee donations would be appreciated.
