CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
ATMA
ATMA

Reputation: 1466

Removing a group of words from a character vector

Let's say that I have a character vector of random names. I also have another character vector with a number of car makes and I want to remove any occurrence of a car incident in the original vector.

So given the vectors:

dat = c("Tonyhonda","DaveFord","Alextoyota")
car = c("Honda","Ford","Toyota","honda","ford","toyota")

I want to end up with something like below:

dat = c("Tony","Dave","Alex")

How can I remove part of a string in R?

Upvotes: 8

Views: 4493

Answers (2)

BLT
BLT

Reputation: 2552

Just formalizing 42-'s comment above. Rather than using 

car = c("Honda","Ford","Toyota","honda","ford","toyota")

You can just use:

carlist = c("Honda","Ford","Toyota")

gsub(x = dat, pattern = paste(car, collapse = "|"), replacement = "", ignore.case = TRUE)
[1] "Tony" "Dave" "Alex"

That allows you to only put each word you want to exclude in the list one time.

Upvotes: 1

TheComeOnMan
TheComeOnMan

Reputation: 12905

gsub(x = dat, pattern = paste(car, collapse = "|"), replacement = "")
[1] "Tony" "Dave" "Alex"

Upvotes: 17

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