HI, In this case, all the elements in Dat$att are found in Replace. Dat1<-within(Dat,{att<-as.character(att)}) vec1<-unlist(lapply(strsplit(Dat1$att,""),unique)) vec1 #[1] "b" "b" "b" "d" "b" "b" "a" "c" "a" "d" "a" "b" "b" "b" "b" "d" "b" "b" "d" #[20] "b"
Dat1[5:7,2]<-c("uu","tt","vv") vec1<-unlist(lapply(strsplit(Dat1$att,""),unique)) Dat1$att<-ifelse(vec1%in%Replace,vec1,Dat1$att) Dat1$att # [1] "b" "b" "b" "d" "uu" "t" "vv" "c" "a" "d" "a" "b" "b" "b" "b" #[16] "d" "b" "b" "d" "b" A.K. ----- Original Message ----- From: Christofer Bogaso <bogaso.christo...@gmail.com> To: r-help <r-help@r-project.org> Cc: Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 4:48 AM Subject: [R] Need some help on Text manipulation. Dear all, Let say I have following data-frame: Dat <- structure(list(dat = c(-0.387795842956327, -0.23270882099043, -0.89528973290562, 0.95857175595512, 1.61680582493783, -1.17738110289352, 0.210601060411423, -0.827369747447338, -0.36896112964414, 0.440288648776096, 1.28018410608809, -0.897113649961341, 0.342216546981718, -1.17288066266219, -1.57994101992621, -0.913655547602414, -2.54753726314408, -0.617703410989815, -0.443272763891558, 0.359181170918489), att = structure(c(2L, 2L, 2L, 4L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 3L, 1L, 4L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 4L, 2L, 2L, 4L, 2L), .Label = c("aa", "bb", "cc", "dd"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("dat", "att"), row.names = c(NA, -20L), class = "data.frame"); Dat Now I want to replace the 2nd column with: Replace <- letters[1:20] The rule is as follows: Consider the 1st element of the 2nd colume: 'bb'. Now I need to see which element of 'Replace' is contained in 'bb'? Obviously, this will be 'b'. Therefore I need to replace "bb" with "b". And so on for all elements of 2nd column. This is obviously an straightforward example. However I have some more complex problem of replacing like that. I want to get the idea how to achieve that programmatically. Can somebody help me? Thanks and regards, ______________________________________________ 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. ______________________________________________ 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.