Dear Chris, If I understand correctly what you want, how about the following?
> rows <- apply(zz[, 2:3], 1, function(x) any(sapply(alarm.words, grepl, x=x))) > zz[rows, ] v1 v2 v3 v4 3 -1.022329 green turtle ronald weasley 2 6 0.336599 waffle the hamster red sparks 1 9 -1.631874 yellow giraffe with a long neck gandalf the white 1 10 1.130622 black bear gandalf the grey 2 I hope this helps, John ------------------------------------------------ John Fox, Professor McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/ On Wed, 08 Jul 2015 22:23:37 -0400 "Christopher W. Ryan" <cr...@binghamton.edu> wrote: > Running R 3.1.1 on windows 7 > > I want to identify as a case any record in a dataframe that contains any > of several keywords in any of several variables. > > Example: > > # create a dataframe with 4 variables and 10 records > v2 <- c("white bird", "blue bird", "green turtle", "quick brown fox", > "big black dog", "waffle the hamster", "benny likes food a lot", "hello > world", "yellow giraffe with a long neck", "black bear") > v3 <- c("harry potter", "hermione grainger", "ronald weasley", "ginny > weasley", "dudley dursley", "red sparks", "blue sparks", "white dress > robes", "gandalf the white", "gandalf the grey") > zz <- data.frame(v1=rnorm(10), v2=v2, v3=v3, v4=rpois(10, lambda=2), > stringsAsFactors=FALSE) > str(zz) > zz > > # here are the keywords > alarm.words <- c("red", "green", "turtle", "gandalf") > > # For each row/record, I want to test whether the string in v2 or the > string in v3 contains any of the strings in alarm.words. And then if so, > set zz$v5=TRUE for that record. > > # I'm thinking the str_detect function in the stringr package ought to > be able to help, perhaps with some use of apply over the rows, but I > obviously misunderstand something about how str_detect works > > library(stringr) > > str_detect(zz[,2:3], alarm.words) # error: the target of the search > # must be a vector, not multiple > # columns > > str_detect(zz[1:4,2:3], alarm.words) # same error > > str_detect(zz[,2], alarm.words) # error, length of alarm.words > # is less than the number of > # rows I am using for the > # comparison > > str_detect(zz[1:4,2], alarm.words) # works as hoped when > length(alarm.words) # confining nrows > # to the length of alarm.words > > str_detect(zz, alarm.words) # obviously not right > > # maybe I need apply() ? > my.f <- function(x){str_detect(x, alarm.words)} > > apply(zz[,2], 1, my.f) # again, a mismatch in lengths > # between alarm.words and that > # in which I am searching for > # matching strings > > apply(zz, 2, my.f) # now I'm getting somewhere > apply(zz[1:4,], 2, my.f) # but still only works with 4 > # rows of the dataframe > > > # perhaps %in% could do the job? > > Appreciate any advice. > > --Chris Ryan > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > 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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.