Thanks for the quick response. I should phrase my question differently because everything is working fine, I am just trying to find a more efficient approach:
1. What's the maximum size of the patterns argument in grep? Can't find it online. 2. I am trying to match 7,700 character strings to about 10,000 vectors each containing about 5,000 strings using grep. Is there a way to do this faster? It is very slow. Thanks Sarah Goslee wrote > > Hi, > > Given that you can't provide a full example, please at least provide > str() on your data, more complete information on the problem, and > ideally a small toy example that demonstrates precisely what you are > doing. > > For instance, you tell us that you "get an error message" but you > never tell us what it is. Don't you think we might need to know what > the error is to be able to diagnose and fix it? > > Also, note that your "working" example simply overwrites > array$chunk1[j] four times. > > Sarah > > On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 10:45 AM, mdvaan <mathijsdevaan@> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I am using R's grep function to find patterns in vectors of strings. The >> number of patterns I would like to match is 7,700 (of different sizes). I >> noticed that I get an error message when I do the following: >> >> data <- array() >> for (j in 1:length(x)) >> { >> array[j] <- length(grep(paste(patterns[1:7700], collapse = "|"), x[j], >> value = T)) >> } >> >> When I break this up into 4 chunks of patterns it works: >> >> data <- array() >> for (j in 1:length(x)) >> { >> array$chunk1[j] <- length(grep(paste(patterns[1:2500], collapse = "|"), >> x[j], value = T)) >> array$chunk1[j] <- length(grep(paste(patterns[2501:5000], collapse = >> "|"), >> x[j], value = T)) >> array$chunk1[j] <- length(grep(paste(patterns[5001:7500], collapse = >> "|"), >> x[j], value = T)) >> array$chunk1[j] <- length(grep(paste(patterns[7501:7700], collapse = >> "|"), >> x[j], value = T)) >> } >> >> My questions: what's the maximum size of the patterns argument in grep? >> Is >> there a way to do this faster? It is very slow. >> >> Thanks. >> >> Math >> >> Sorry for not providing a reproducible example. It's a size issue which >> makes it difficult to provide an example. >> > > > -- > Sarah Goslee > http://www.functionaldiversity.org > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@ 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. > -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Maximum-number-of-patterns-and-speed-in-grep-tp4635613p4635626.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.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.