Part of your problem is that your regexes have spaces in them, so
that's what you're matching.
A small reproducible example would be more useful. I'm not feeling
inclined to wade through all your linked files on Friday evening, but
see if this helps:
testdata<- "[Engel, Kathrin M. Y.; Schroeck, Kristin; Schoeneberg, Torsten; Schulz, Angela] Univ
Leipzig, Fac Med, Inst Biochem, Leipzig, New Zealand; [Teupser, Daniel; Holdt, Lesca Miriam; Thiery,
Joachim] Univ Leipzig, Fac Med, Inst Lab Med Clin Chem& Mol Diagnost, Leipzig, USA; [Toenjes, Anke;
Kern, Matthias; Blueher, Matthias; Stumvoll, Michael] Univ Leipzig, Fac Med, Dept Internal Med, Leipzig,
Germany; [Dietrich, Kerstin; Kovacs, Peter] Univ Leipzig, Fac Med, Interdisciplinary Ctr Clin Res,
Leipzig, Germany; [Kruegel, Ute] Univ Leipzig, Fac Med, Rudolf Boehm Inst Pharmacol& Toxicol,
Leipzig, Germany; [Scheidt, Holger A.; Schiller, Juergen; Huster, Daniel] Univ Leipzig, Fac Med, Inst
Med Phys& Biophys, Leipzig, Germany; [Brockmann, Gudrun A.] Humboldt Univ, Inst Anim Sci, D-10099
Berlin, Germany; [Augustin, Martin] Ingenium Pharmaceut AG, Martinsried, Germany"
results<- gsub("\\[.*?\\]", "", testdata)
results<- unlist(strsplit(results, ";"))
results<- sapply(results, function(x)sub("^.*, ([A-Za-z ]*)$", "\\1", x))
names(results)<- NULL
results
[1] "New Zealand" "USA" "Germany" "Germany" "Germany"
"Germany" "Germany" "Germany"
Sarah
On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Sabina Arndt<sabina.ar...@hotmail.de> wrote:
Hello r-help members,
the solutions which Sarah Goslee and arun sent to me in such a prompt and
helpful manner work well with the examples I cut from the data.frame I'm
analyzing. Thank you very much for that!
I incorporated them into my R-script and discovered that it still doesn't
work properly, unfortunately. I have no idea why that's the case.
You see, I want to extract country names from the contents of tab-delimited
text files. This is an example of the data I'm using:
http://pastebin.com/mYZNDXg6
This is the script I'm using to import the data:
http://pastebin.com/Z10UUH3z (It requires the text files to be in a folder
which doesn't contain any other .txt files.)
This is the script I'm using to extract the country names:
http://pastebin.com/G37fuPba
This is the string that's in the relevant field of the first record I'm
working on:
[Engel, Kathrin M. Y.; Schroeck, Kristin; Schoeneberg, Torsten; Schulz,
Angela] Univ Leipzig, Fac Med, Inst Biochem, Leipzig, Germany; [Teupser,
Daniel; Holdt, Lesca Miriam; Thiery, Joachim] Univ Leipzig, Fac Med, Inst
Lab Med Clin Chem& Mol Diagnost, Leipzig, Germany; [Toenjes, Anke; Kern,
Matthias; Blueher, Matthias; Stumvoll, Michael] Univ Leipzig, Fac Med, Dept
Internal Med, Leipzig, Germany; [Dietrich, Kerstin; Kovacs, Peter] Univ
Leipzig, Fac Med, Interdisciplinary Ctr Clin Res, Leipzig, Germany;
[Kruegel, Ute] Univ Leipzig, Fac Med, Rudolf Boehm Inst Pharmacol& Toxicol,
Leipzig, Germany; [Scheidt, Holger A.; Schiller, Juergen; Huster, Daniel]
Univ Leipzig, Fac Med, Inst Med Phys& Biophys, Leipzig, Germany;
[Brockmann, Gudrun A.] Humboldt Univ, Inst Anim Sci, D-10099 Berlin,
Germany; [Augustin, Martin] Ingenium Pharmaceut AG, Martinsried, Germany
This is the incorrect result my extraction script gives me for the first
record:
C1s[1]
[1] "[ENGEL, KATHRIN M. Y." "KRISTIN" "TORSTEN"
[4] "GERMANY" "DANIEL" "LESCA MIRIAM"
[7] "GERMANY" "ANKE" "MATTHIAS"
[10] "MATTHIAS" "GERMANY" "KERSTIN"
[13] "GERMANY" "GERMANY" "[SCHEIDT, HOLGER
A."
[16] "JUERGEN" "GERMANY" "HUMBOLDT"
[19] "GERMANY"
For some reason the first and sixth pair of the eight square brackets are
not removed ... Do you understand why?
Instead I'd like to get this result, though:
C1s[1]
[1] "GERMANY" "GERMANY" "GERMANY"
[4] "GERMANY" "GERMANY" "GERMANY"
[7] "HUMBOLDT" "GERMANY"
What am I doing wrong? What are the errors in my R-script?
Would anybody be so kind as to take a look and help me out, please?
Thank you very much in advance!
Faithfully yours,
Sabina Arndt
