Using strcapture seems like a great workaround for use cases of this kind, at
least in base R. I agree as well that filling with NA for regmatches(...,
gregexpr(...)) makes less sense, given the outputs are lists and thus are
retained in the list. Also, I suppose in the meantime the stringr package can
be used when non-dropping vector outputs are desired.
However, I do think that non-dropping regex string extraction/matching in
vector outputs from regmatches(..., regexpr(...)) or strextract would be a
great (optional) design feature to have in base R for sake of consistency with
the rest of the language (missing values, denoted by NA, are generally not
dropped from vectors elsewhere and seem to agree conceptually with empty
matches) and would help R to reach greater feature parity with MATLAB and
Pandas in this respect (granted, Pandas is not technically a language on its
own).
Although I have written personal wrappers and used stringr to accomplish the
non-dropping behavior in the past, I have nevertheless found the behavior of
base R string operations mildly astonishing (in the sense of POLA) and think
others may have as well. As the stringr documentation puts it, "they lag behind
the string operations in other programming languages, so that some things that
are easy to do in languages like Ruby or Python are rather hard to do in R."
Since consistent, robust string operations are often a standard base feature of
other data science and scientific programming languages, I think this minor
change would be a great improvement to the language and hopefully help promote
adoption of R, especially given the surge in text-based data analysis in recent
years.
Alternatively, although I generally don't use the Tidyverse packages very
often, stringr seems like a great candidate for inclusion in base or
recommended R if the R Core team and the package developer see it fitting (just
a suggestion and probably a long shot).
However, I will try not to belabor this point further. In any case, thank you!
Best,CG
CG
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