CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rstringreplace
Ferit
Ferit

Reputation: 648

Remove strings that contain a colon in R

this an exemplary excerpt of my data set. It looks like as follows:

Description;ID;Date
wa119:d Here comes the first row;id_112;2018/03/02
ax21:3 Here comes the second row;id_115;2018/03/02
bC230:13 Here comes the third row;id_234;2018/03/02

I want to delete those words which contain a a colon. In this case, this would be wa119:d, ax21:3 and bC230:13 so that my new data set should look like as follows:

Description;ID;Date
Here comes the first row;id_112;2018/03/02
Here comes the second row;id_115;2018/03/02
Here comes the third row;id_234;2018/03/02

Unfortunately, I was not able to find a regular expression / solution with gsub? Can anyone help?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2185

Answers (3)

Tyler Rinker
Tyler Rinker

Reputation: 109844

Here's one approach:

## reading in yor data
dat <- read.table(text ='
Description;ID;Date
wa119:d Here comes the first row;id_112;2018/03/02
ax21:3 Here comes the second row;id_115;2018/03/02
bC230:13 Here comes the third row;id:234;2018/03/02
', sep = ';', header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

## \\w+ = one or more word characters
gsub('\\w+:\\w+\\s+', '', dat$Description)

## [1] "Here comes the first row"  
## [2] "Here comes the second row"
## [3] "Here comes the third row"

More info on \\w a shorthand character class that is the same as [A-Za-z0-9_]:https://www.regular-expressions.info/shorthand.html

Upvotes: 3

MKR
MKR

Reputation: 20085

Another solution that will exactly match expected result from OP could be as:

#data
df <- read.table(text = "Description;ID;Date
wa119:d Here comes the first row;id_112;2018/03/02
ax21:3 Here comes the second row;id_115;2018/03/02
bC230:13 Here comes the third row;id:234;2018/03/02", stringsAsFactors = FALSE, sep="\n")

gsub("[a-zA-Z0-9]+:[a-zA-Z0-9]+\\s", "", df$V1)

#[1] "Description;ID;Date"                        
#[2] "Here comes the first row;id_112;2018/03/02" 
#[3] "Here comes the second row;id_115;2018/03/02"
#[4] "Here comes the third row;id:234;2018/03/02"

Upvotes: 0

lefft
lefft

Reputation: 2105

Supposing the column you want to modify is dat:

dat <- c("wa119:d Here comes the first row",
         "ax21:3 Here comes the second row",
         "bC230:13 Here comes the third row")

Then you can take each element, split it into words, remove the words containing a colon, and then paste what's left back together, yielding what you want:

dat_colon_words_removed <- unlist(lapply(dat, function(string){
  words <- strsplit(string, split=" ")[[1]]
  words <- words[!grepl(":", words)]
  paste(words, collapse=" ")
}))

Upvotes: 0

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