On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 7:17 PM, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendi...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 3:28 PM, Susanta Mohapatra > <mohapatra.susa...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I am working with a dataset for sometime and I need some help in parsing >> some data. >> >> There is a column called "Duration" which has data like following: >> >> 2 minutes => 120 >> 2 min => 120 >> 10 seconds =>10 >> 2 hrs =>7200 >> 2-3 minutes => 150 or 120 >> 5 minutes (when i arrived => 300 >> Flyby approx 20 sec. => 20 >> felt like 10 mins but tim => 600 >> >> I need to convert them to numerics as given. Any help in this regard will be >> highly appreciated. > > Assuming that "convert to numerics as given" means creating a list of > numeric vectors, one per row. >
or if => was supposed to mean that that is the desired result then try this: f <- function(n1, n2, units) { if (n2 == "" && substr(units, 1, 3) == "sec") n1 else if (n2 == "" && substr(units, 1, 3) == "min") paste(60 * as.numeric(n1)) else if (n2 == "" && substr(units, 1, 3) == "hrs") paste(3600 * as.numeric(n1)) else if (n2 != "" && substr(units, 1, 3) == "sec") paste(n1, "or", -as.numeric(n2)) else if (n2 != "" && substr(units, 1, 3) == "min") paste(60 * as.numeric(n1), "or", -60 * as.numeric(n2)) else if (n2 != "" && substr(units, 1, 3) == "hrs") paste(3600 * as.numeric(n1), "or", -3660 * as.numeric(n2)) else NA } xx <- c("2 minutes ", "2 min ", "10 seconds ", "2 hrs ", " 2-3 minutes ", "5 minutes (when i arrived ", "Flyby approx 20 sec. ", "felt like 10 mins but tim ") library(gsubfn) out2 <- strapply(xx, "(\\d+)(-\\d+)? (\\S+)", f) The output looks like this: > str(out2) List of 8 $ : chr "120" $ : chr "120" $ : chr "10" $ : chr "7200" $ : chr "120 or 180" $ : chr "300" $ : chr "20" $ : chr "600" -- Statistics & Software Consulting GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc. tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com ______________________________________________ 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.