Thanks Gabor. That worked really well. I have been reading about the use of POSIX and regular expressions and I tried to use your example to see if I could ignore all matches in which the character preceding (rather than following) the match is one of [:alpha:]? So far, I have been unsuccessful. Could anyone help me out here or direct me to a source that explains the combined use of POSIX and regular expressions? Thanks!
require(gsubfn) # this only checks for the characters following the match and therefore matches also matches the third element # however I want it to match only the 2nd, 5th and 6th elements strapply(c("abc", "ab", "abdef", "defc", "def", " def "), "(def|ab)($|[^[[:alpha:]])") The outcome should look like this: [[1]] NULL [[2]] [1] "ab" [[3]] NULL [[4]] NULL [[5]] [1] "def" [[6]] [1] "def" Gabor Grothendieck wrote > > On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 5:06 PM, mdvaan <mathijsdevaan@> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> In the example below, one of the searched patterns "SE" is matched in the >> word "second". I would like to ignore all matches in which the character >> following the match is one of [:alpha:]. How do I do this without >> removing >> the "ignore.case = T" argument of the strapply function? Thank you very >> much! >> >> # load library >> require(gsubfn) >> # read in data >> data <- c("Santa Fe Gold Corp|Starpharma Holdings|SE") >> # define the object to be searched >> text <- c("the first is Santa Fe Gold Corp", "the second is Starpharma >> Holdings") >> # match >> strapply(text, data, ignore.case = T) >> >> The preferred outcome would be: >> >> [[1]] >> [1] "Santa Fe Gold Corp" >> >> [[2]] >> [1] "Starpharma Holdings" >> >> instead of: >> >> [[1]] >> [1] "Santa Fe Gold Corp" >> >> [[2]] >> [1] "se" "Starpharma Holdings" >> >> > > Try this: > >> strapply(c("abc", "ab", "ab def"), "(ab|d)($|[^[[:alpha:]])") > [[1]] > NULL > > [[2]] > [1] "ab" > > [[3]] > [1] "ab" > > > -- > Statistics & Software Consulting > GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc. > tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP > email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com > > ______________________________________________ > 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/strapply-and-characters-adjacent-to-the-matched-pattern-tp4637673p4637835.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.