CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rif-statementdplyrgrepl
John Thomas
John Thomas

Reputation: 1105

Replace elements of a character vector based on string in R

So I have a dataframe like so:

Occupation
ELECTRICIAN
ROAD ELECTRICIAN
ELECTRICIAN
FARMER
GRASS ELECTRICIAN
POLE ELECTRICIANS
ELECTRICIAN
INSPECTOR

So I would like any time ELECTRICIAN appears to be just ELECTRICIAN, no matter anything else in the cell.

So final product should be:

Occupation
ELECTRICIAN
ELECTRICIAN
ELECTRICIAN
FARMER
ELECTRICIAN
ELECTRICIAN
ELECTRICIAN
INSPECTOR

I tried the following but this did not work....

ifelse(grep('CONDUCTOR',df$Occupation , value=TRUE), "CONDUCTOR",df$Occupation)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 57

Answers (3)

RStudious
RStudious

Reputation: 166

Here's the tidyverse solution using the stringr package.

    library(stringr)      
    df$Occupation<- str_replace_all(df$Occupation,".*ELECTRICIAN.*","ELECTRICIAN")

There's some debate over whether tidyverse solutions are "preferred," but I personally prefer them. I think the function names are much more intuitive both for you and whoever may be reading your code. I also think it's concise and direct, doing exactly what you want to do.

Upvotes: 2

Ronak Shah
Ronak Shah

Reputation: 388982

Using grep you can get the index in Occupation where "ELECTRICIAN" is present and replace those values.

df$Occupation[grep('ELECTRICIAN', df$Occupation)] <- 'ELECTRICIAN'
df

#   Occupation
#1 ELECTRICIAN
#2 ELECTRICIAN
#3 ELECTRICIAN
#4      FARMER
#5 ELECTRICIAN
#6 ELECTRICIAN
#7 ELECTRICIAN
#8   INSPECTOR

Upvotes: 1

Duck
Duck

Reputation: 39595

I would suggest this approach. It is better using grepl() as it produces logic values that can be easily detected in ifelse():

#Data
df <- structure(list(Occupation = c("ELECTRICIAN", "ROAD ELECTRICIAN", 
"ELECTRICIAN", "FARMER", "GRASS ELECTRICIAN", "POLE ELECTRICIANS", 
"ELECTRICIAN", "INSPECTOR")), row.names = c(NA, -8L), class = "data.frame")

Code:

#Code
df$Occupation <- ifelse(grepl('ELECTRICIAN',df$Occupation), 'ELECTRICIAN',df$Occupation)

Output:

   Occupation
1 ELECTRICIAN
2 ELECTRICIAN
3 ELECTRICIAN
4      FARMER
5 ELECTRICIAN
6 ELECTRICIAN
7 ELECTRICIAN
8   INSPECTOR

Upvotes: 2

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