On Sep 15, 2010, at 10:16 AM, raje...@cse.iitm.ac.in wrote: > > Hi, > > I need to check if a string "<rh>a,b,c,d<rh>" is delimited by two "<rh>" 's > as efficiently as possible(I need to do this a lot of times) and return TRUE. > Can someone suggest a good technique?
See ?grep and ?regex > grepl("^<rh>.*<rh>$", "<rh>a,b,c,d<rh>") [1] TRUE You can pass the entire source vector to grepl(): Vec <- c("<rh>a,b,c,d<rh>", "1, 2, 3, 4", "a, b, c, d<rh>", "<rh>1, 2, 3, 4<rh>") > grepl("^<rh>.*<rh>$", Vec) [1] TRUE FALSE FALSE TRUE HTH, Marc Schwartz ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.