Great. thank you Bernd! Learned a new thing here. John
________________________________ From: Bernd Weiss <bernd.we...@uni-koeln.de> Cc: r-help@r-project.org Sent: Thu, March 31, 2011 6:19:25 PM Subject: Re: [R] regular expression Am 31.03.2011 21:06, schrieb array chip: > Ok then this code didn't do what I wanted. I want "not including > 'arg' before '.symptom'", not individual letters of "arg", but rather > as a word. > > Bill Dunlap suggested using invert=T, it works for single 1 > condition, but not for 2 conditions here: not including "arg" before > ".", but at the same time, does include ".symptom". > > Any other suggestions would be appreciated This does work (but I am by no means an expert in regex...). I am using 'negative lookbehind'[1] to define an expression like 'arg'. > grep('(?<!(arg))\\.symptom',"arg.symptom",value=T, perl = T) character(0) > grep('(?<!(arg))\\.symptom',"liver.symptom",value=T, perl = T) [1] "liver.symptom" Bernd [1] http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.