CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
Ruediger Ziege
Ruediger Ziege

Reputation: 330

Replacing multiple strings in a character vector withoug using a loop in R

I have script in which I want to replace a set of strings indicated by ##

  script <- c("This is #var1# with a mean of #mean1#")

My key value list is:

  pairs <- list(
             list("#var1#", "Depression"),
             list("#mean1#", "10.1")
           )

My loop looks like this and does its job.

  for (pair in pairs) {
    script <- gsub(pair[[1]], pair[[2]], script)
  }

However, does anybody know a way to solve this without using a loop?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1180

Answers (2)

Scarabee
Scarabee

Reputation: 5714

You could use stringr.

As mentioned in ?str_replace:

To perform multiple replacements in each element of string, pass a named vector (c(pattern1 = replacement1)) to str_replace_all.

So in your case:

library(stringr)

str_replace_all(script, setNames(sapply(pairs, "[[", 2), sapply(pairs, "[[", 1)))
# [1] "This is Depression with a mean of 10.1"

Upvotes: 2

bouncyball
bouncyball

Reputation: 10781

I think with a few changes, you could use the glue package. The changes involve using a data.frame to store your key values, and slightly tweaking the formatting of your text. 

library(glue)

tt <- 'This is {var1} with a mean of {mean1}'

dat <- data.frame(
  'var1' = c('Depression', 'foo'),
  'mean1' = c(10.1, 0),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)

glue(tt,
     var1 = dat$var1,
     mean1 = dat$mean1)

This is Depression with a mean of 10.1
This is foo with a mean of 0

Upvotes: 1

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