On Dec 26, 2010, at 6:29 PM, Bryan Hanson wrote:
Hello R Folks...
I've been looking around the 'net and I see many complex solutions
in various languages to this question, but I have a pretty simple
need (and I'm not much good at regex). I want to use a chemical
formula as a function argument. The formula would be in "Hill
order" which is to list C, then H, then all other elements in
alphabetical order. My example will have only a limited number of
elements, few enough that one can search directly for each element.
So some examples would be C5H12, or C5H12O or C5H11BrO (note that
for oxygen and bromine, O or Br, there is no following number
meaning a 1 is implied).
Let's say
> form <- "C5H11BrO"
Well here's how I see it:
The "form" can be split with a regular expression:
Capital letter followed by zero or one lower, followeed by a various
number of digits
greg <- gregexpr("[A-Z]{1}[a-z]?[0-9]*", form)
Append a number equal to one moe lan the ength for reasins that will
become clear
ugreg <- c(unlist(greg), nchar(form)+1)
Then use substring function to serially pick from a split point to one
minus the next split point (or in that case of the last element one
minus the length of the string:
> sapply(1:(length(ugreg)-1), function(z) substr(form, ugreg[z],
ugreg[z+1]-1) )
[1] "C5" "H11" "Br" "O"
Then you can split these "triples" (cap,lower,n) and if n is absent
assume 1.
> sub("(\\d*)$", "", sapply(1:(length(ugreg)-1), # blank out the
digits
function(z) substr(form, ugreg[z], ugreg[z+1]-1) ) )
[1] "C" "H" "Br" "O"
sub("^$", "1", sub("([A-Za-z]*)", "", # subst "1" for empty strings
sapply(1:(length(ugreg)-1),
function(z) substr(form, ugreg[z], ugreg[z
+1]-1) ) ) )
[1] "5" "11" "1" "1"
If you limited the number of elements searched for, it might improve
the error trapping, I suppose.
--
David.
I'd like to get the count of each element, so in this case I need to
extract C and 5, H and 11, Br and 1, O and 1 (I want to calculate
the molecular weight by mulitplying). Sounds pretty simple, but my
experiments with grep and strsplit don't immediately clue me into an
obvious solution. As I said, I don't need a general solution to the
problem of calculating molecular weight from an arbitrary formula,
that seems quite challenging, just a way to convert "form" into a
list or data frame which I can then do the math on.
Here's hoping this is a simple issue for more experienced R users!
TIA, Bryan
***********
Bryan Hanson
Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry
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David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT
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and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
