CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexr
user3456230
user3456230

Reputation: 217

remove exact match word from a string

I would like to remove the word "amp" in the below sentence.

original:

x <- 'come on ***amp*** this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket'

What I want:

x <- 'come on this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket'

However, if I used gsub, the "amp" in the word of "rampant" will be removed as well which is NOT the case I want. Can I know what function should I use in this case?

> gsub("amp","", x)
[1] "come on  this just encourages the already rant mispronunciation of phuket"

Upvotes: 0

Views: 4329

Answers (3)

Rich Scriven
Rich Scriven

Reputation: 99331

You could just find the occurrence of "amp" that has a space in front.

> gsub("\\samp", "", x)
## [1] "come on this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket"

where \\s means space. This is more readable as

> gsub(" amp", "", x)

Upvotes: 0

Paul Hiemstra
Paul Hiemstra

Reputation: 60924

You could also split the string into words, and then compare:

x <- 'come on this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket'
split_into_words = strsplit(x, ' ')[[1]]
filtered_words = split_into_words[!split_into_words == 'amp']
paste(filtered_words, collapse = ' ')
[1] "come on this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket"

Upvotes: 1

Sven Hohenstein
Sven Hohenstein

Reputation: 81683

You can use this regex:

gsub("\\bamp\\b","", x)
# [1] "come on  this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket"

The \\b means word boundary.

Upvotes: 1

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