CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rstring
Bincza
Bincza

Reputation: 13

Replacing entire string when a single word is in the string R

I was wondering if anyone had come across a solution to this problem when cleaning up data in R. The idea is to have a list of strings for example:

strings = c("hello world", "goodbye all", "help is appreciated", "hello sam")

then we would go through the list of strings and whenever a certain word is found the entire string would be replaced.

Therefore if we are looking for the word "hello" it would be replaced with "math"

so the output I would be looking for would be:

"math", "goodbye all", "help is appreciated", "math".

Any help or ideas are appreciated.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 43

Answers (2)

G. Grothendieck
G. Grothendieck

Reputation: 269654

Try this:

sub(".*hello.*", "math", strings)

giving:

[1] "math"                "goodbye all"         "help is appreciated"
[4] "math"

Upvotes: 1

joran
joran

Reputation: 173577

Just use grepl:

strings = c("hello world", "goodbye all", "help is appreciated", "hello sam")
> strings[grepl("hello",strings)] <- "math"
> strings
[1] "math"                "goodbye all"         "help is appreciated" "math"

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions