CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdplyrcapitalize
Philippe Ramirez
Philippe Ramirez

Reputation: 127

Capitalize with dplyr

I am doing data cleaning with dplyr. One of the things I want to do is to capitalize values in certain columns.

    data$surname
    john
    Mary
    John
    mary
    ...

I suppose I have to use the mutate function of dplyr with something like this

    titleCase <- function(x) {
    + s <- strsplit(as.character(x), " ")[[1]]
    + paste(toupper(substring(s, 1, 1)), substring(s, 2),
    + sep = "", collapse = " ")
    + }

But how to combine both? I get all kinds of errors or truncated data frames

Thanks

Upvotes: 5

Views: 10007

Answers (3)

Obe
Obe

Reputation: 341

A little late to the party but you can use stringr package 

library(stringr)
library(dplyr)

example1 <- tibble(names = c("john" ,"Mary", "John", "mary"))

example1 %>%
mutate(names = str_to_title(names))

##  names
##  <chr>
## 1 John 
## 2 Mary 
## 3 John 
## 4 Mary

This will still work if you want all terms capitalized

example2 <- tibble(names = c("john james" ,"Mary carey", "John Jack", "mary Harry"))

example2 %>%
mutate(names = str_to_title(names))

##  names
##  <chr>
## 1 John James 
## 2 Mary Carey 
## 3 John Jack
## 4 Mary Harry

If you only want the first term capitalized, str_to_sentence() will work

example2 %>%
mutate(names = str_to_sentence(names))

##  names
##  <chr>
## 1 John james 
## 2 Mary carey 
## 3 John jack
## 4 Mary harry

Upvotes: 10

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 887028

We can use sub

sub("(.)", "\\U\\1", data$surname, perl=TRUE)
#[1] "John" "Mary" "John" "Mary"

Implementing in the dplyr workflow

library(dplyr)
data %>%
     mutate(surname = sub("(.)", "\\U\\1", surname, perl=TRUE))

If we need to do this on multiple columns

data %>%
     mutate_each(funs(sub("(.)", "\\U\\1", ., perl=TRUE)))

Just to check

res <- data1 %>%  
          mutate(surname = sub("(.)", "\\U\\1", surname, perl=TRUE))
sum(grepl("[A-Z]", substr(res$surname, 1,1)))
#[1] 500000

data

data <- data.frame(surname=c("john", "Mary", "John", "mary"), 
firstname = c("abe", "Jacob", "george", "jen"), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

data1 <-  data.frame(surname = sample(c("john", "Mary", "John", "mary"), 
    500000, replace=TRUE), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

Upvotes: 9

RHertel
RHertel

Reputation: 23788

There is a dedicated function for this that you can try:

R.utils::capitalize(data$surname)

If this needs to be implemented into a dplyr procedure, one could try the following:

library(dplyr)
library(R.utils)
data %>% mutate(surname = capitalize(surname))

Upvotes: 6

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