This chapter introduces you to string manipulation in R. You’ll learn the basics of how strings work and how to create them by hand, but the focus of this chapter will be on regular expressions, or regexps for short. Regular expressions are useful because strings usually contain unstructured or semi-structured data, and regexps are a concise language for describing patterns in strings. When you first look at a regexp, you’ll think a cat walked across your keyboard, but as your understanding improves they will soon start to make sense.
This chapter will focus on the stringr package for string manipulation, which is part of the core tidyverse.
You can create strings with either single quotes or double quotes. Unlike other languages, there is no difference in behaviour. I recommend always using ", unless you want to create a string that contains multiple ". string1 <- "This is a string" string2 <- 'If I want to include a "quote" inside a string, I use single quotes' If you forget to close a quote, you’ll see +, the continuation character: > "This is a string without a closing quote + + + HELP I'M STUCKIf this happen to you, press Escape and try again! To include a literal single or double quote in a string you can use \ to “escape” it: double_quote <- "\"" # or '"' single_quote <- '\'' # or "'" That means if you want to include a literal backslash, you’ll need to double it up: "\\". Beware that the printed representation of a string is not the same as string itself, because the printed representation shows the escapes. To see the raw contents of the string, use writeLines(): x <- c("\"", "\\") x #> [1] "\"" "\\" writeLines(x) #> " #> \ There are a handful of other special characters. The most common are "\n", newline, and "\t", tab, but you can see the complete list by requesting help on ": ?'"', or ?"'". You’ll also sometimes see strings like "\u00b5", this is a way of writing non-English characters that works on all platforms: x <- "\u00b5" x #> [1] "µ" Multiple strings are often stored in a character vector, which you can create with c(): c("one", "two", "three") #> [1] "one" "two" "three"
Base R contains many functions to work with strings but we’ll avoid them because they can be inconsistent, which makes them hard to remember. Instead we’ll use functions from stringr. These have more intuitive names, and all start with str_. For example, str_length() tells you the number of characters in a string: str_length(c("a", "R for data science", NA)) #> [1] 1 18 NA The common str_ prefix is particularly useful if you use RStudio, because typing str_ will trigger autocomplete, allowing you to see all stringr functions:
To combine two or more strings, use str_c(): str_c("x", "y") #> [1] "xy" str_c("x", "y", "z") #> [1] "xyz" Use the sep argument to control how they’re separated: str_c("x", "y", sep = ", ") #> [1] "x, y" Like most other functions in R, missing values are contagious. If you want them to print as "NA", use str_replace_na(): As shown above, str_c() is vectorised, and it automatically recycles shorter vectors to the same length as the longest: str_c("prefix-", c("a", "b", "c"), "-suffix") #> [1] "prefix-a-suffix" "prefix-b-suffix" "prefix-c-suffix" Objects of length 0 are silently dropped. This is particularly useful in conjunction with if: name <- "Hadley" time_of_day <- "morning" birthday <- FALSE str_c( "Good ", time_of_day, " ", name, if (birthday) " and HAPPY BIRTHDAY", "." ) #> [1] "Good morning Hadley." To collapse a vector of strings into a single string, use collapse: str_c(c("x", "y", "z"), collapse = ", ") #> [1] "x, y, z"
Above I used str_to_lower() to change the text to lower case. You can also use str_to_upper() or str_to_title(). However, changing case is more complicated than it might at first appear because different languages have different rules for changing case. You can pick which set of rules to use by specifying a locale: # Turkish has two i's: with and without a dot, and it # has a different rule for capitalising them: str_to_upper(c("i", "ı")) #> [1] "I" "I" str_to_upper(c("i", "ı"), locale = "tr") #> [1] "İ" "I" The locale is specified as a ISO 639 language code, which is a two or three letter abbreviation. If you don’t already know the code for your language, Wikipedia has a good list. If you leave the locale blank, it will use the current locale, as provided by your operating system. Another important operation that’s affected by the locale is sorting. The base R order() and sort() functions sort strings using the current locale. If you want robust behaviour across different computers, you may want to use str_sort() and str_order() which take an additional locale argument: x <- c("apple", "eggplant", "banana") str_sort(x, locale = "en") # English #> [1] "apple" "banana" "eggplant" str_sort(x, locale = "haw") # Hawaiian #> [1] "apple" "eggplant" "banana"
Regexps are a very terse language that allow you to describe patterns in strings. They take a little while to get your head around, but once you understand them, you’ll find them extremely useful. To learn regular expressions, we’ll use str_view() and str_view_all(). These functions take a character vector and a regular expression, and show you how they match. We’ll start with very simple regular expressions and then gradually get more and more complicated. Once you’ve mastered pattern matching, you’ll learn how to apply those ideas with various stringr functions.
The simplest patterns match exact strings: x <- c("apple", "banana", "pear") str_view(x, "an") The next step up in complexity is ., which matches any character (except a newline): But if “.” matches any character, how do you match the character “.”? You need to use an “escape” to tell the regular expression you want to match it exactly, not use its special behaviour. Like strings, regexps use the backslash, \, to escape special behaviour. So to match an ., you need the regexp \.. Unfortunately this creates a problem. We use strings to represent regular expressions, and \ is also used as an escape symbol in strings. So to create the regular expression \. we need the string "\\.". # To create the regular expression, we need \\ dot <- "\\." # But the expression itself only contains one: writeLines(dot) #> \. # And this tells R to look for an explicit . str_view(c("abc", "a.c", "bef"), "a\\.c") If \ is used as an escape character in regular expressions, how do you match a literal \? Well you need to escape it, creating the regular expression \\. To create that regular expression, you need to use a string, which also needs to escape \. That means to match a literal \ you need to write "\\\\" — you need four backslashes to match one! x <- "a\\b" writeLines(x) #> a\b str_view(x, "\\\\") In this book, I’ll write regular expression as \. and strings that represent the regular expression as "\\.".
By default, regular expressions will match any part of a string. It’s often useful to anchor the regular expression so that it matches from the start or end of the string. You can use:
x <- c("apple", "banana", "pear") str_view(x, "^a") str_view(x, "a$")To remember which is which, try this mnemonic which I learned from Evan Misshula: if you begin with power (^), you end up with money ($). To force a regular expression to only match a complete string, anchor it with both ^ and $: x <- c("apple pie", "apple", "apple cake") str_view(x, "apple") str_view(x, "^apple$")You can also match the boundary between words with \b. I don’t often use this in R, but I will sometimes use it when I’m doing a search in RStudio when I want to find the name of a function that’s a component of other functions. For example, I’ll search for \bsum\b to avoid matching summarise, summary, rowsum and so on.
There are a number of special patterns that match more than one character. You’ve already seen ., which matches any character apart from a newline. There are four other useful tools:
Remember, to create a regular expression containing \d or \s, you’ll need to escape the \ for the string, so you’ll type "\\d" or "\\s". A character class containing a single character is a nice alternative to backslash escapes when you want to include a single metacharacter in a regex. Many people find this more readable. # Look for a literal character that normally has special meaning in a regex str_view(c("abc", "a.c", "a*c", "a c"), "a[.]c") str_view(c("abc", "a.c", "a*c", "a c"), ".[*]c") str_view(c("abc", "a.c", "a*c", "a c"), "a[ ]")This works for most (but not all) regex metacharacters: $ . | ? * + ( ) [ {. Unfortunately, a few characters have special meaning even inside a character class and must be handled with backslash escapes: ] \ ^ and -. You can use alternation to pick between one or more alternative patterns. For example, abc|d..f will match either ‘“abc”’, or "deaf". Note that the precedence for | is low, so that abc|xyz matches abc or xyz not abcyz or abxyz. Like with mathematical expressions, if precedence ever gets confusing, use parentheses to make it clear what you want: str_view(c("grey", "gray"), "gr(e|a)y")
The next step up in power involves controlling how many times a pattern matches:
x <- "1888 is the longest year in Roman numerals: MDCCCLXXXVIII" str_view(x, "CC?") str_view(x, "CC+") str_view(x, 'C[LX]+')Note that the precedence of these operators is high, so you can write: colou?r to match either American or British spellings. That means most uses will need parentheses, like bana(na)+. You can also specify the number of matches precisely:
By default these matches are “greedy”: they will match the longest string possible. You can make them “lazy”, matching the shortest string possible by putting a ? after them. This is an advanced feature of regular expressions, but it’s useful to know that it exists: str_view(x, 'C[LX]+?')
Earlier, you learned about parentheses as a way to disambiguate complex expressions. Parentheses also create a numbered capturing group (number 1, 2 etc.). A capturing group stores the part of the string matched by the part of the regular expression inside the parentheses. You can refer to the same text as previously matched by a capturing group with backreferences, like \1, \2 etc. For example, the following regular expression finds all fruits that have a repeated pair of letters. str_view(fruit, "(..)\\1", match = TRUE) (Shortly, you’ll also see how they’re useful in conjunction with str_match().)
When you use a pattern that’s a string, it’s automatically wrapped into a call to regex(): You can use the other arguments of regex() to control details of the match:
There are three other functions you can use instead of regex():
There are two useful function in base R that also use regular expressions:
stringr is built on top of the stringi package. stringr is useful when you’re learning because it exposes a minimal set of functions, which have been carefully picked to handle the most common string manipulation functions. stringi, on the other hand, is designed to be comprehensive. It contains almost every function you might ever need: stringi has 256 functions to stringr’s 49. If you find yourself struggling to do something in stringr, it’s worth taking a look at stringi. The packages work very similarly, so you should be able to translate your stringr knowledge in a natural way. The main difference is the prefix: str_ vs. stri_.
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