CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rstringgrepgsub
L Tyrone
L Tyrone

Reputation: 6885

Replace truncated word in a string

I have inherited an R project that has a dataframe with truncated text strings.

temp <- data.frame(taname2 = c("ends with Distr", "distr at start", "the word distr in the middle", "distr", "district"))

Based on some answers on SO, I have tried:

temp$taname2 <- gsub("\bDistr\b", "District", temp$taname2)

This did not work. I also tried:

temp$taname2 <- gsub("Distr", "District", temp$taname2)

but this resulted in rows already containing the word "District" being changed to "Districtic", "Districtict", or similar. This:

temp$taname2[grep("\bDistr\b",temp$taname2)] <- "District"

also did not work.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 28874

Answers (3)

ronir
ronir

Reputation: 36

gsub("\\s+Distr$|^Distr\\s+|\\s+Distr\\s+|^Distr$", " District ", 
     c("ends with Distr", "distr at start", "the word distr in the middle", "distr", "district"),  ignore.case = T)

Upvotes: 1

MERose
MERose

Reputation: 4421

Use the stringi package:

require(stringi)

mydf<-data.frame(c("\bDistr\b", "\bDistr\b", "\bDistr\b", "\bDistr\b"))
stri_replace_all(mydf[,1], "", fixed="\b")
[1] "Distr" "Distr" "Distr" "Distr"

Upvotes: 0

Kenty Ramdatt
Kenty Ramdatt

Reputation: 21

You need to make use of regular expressions as well as the gsub function. I think this question is answered here: In R, replace text within a string

Hope this helps.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions