On 24/08/17 02:46, Bert Gunter wrote:
Inline.
-- Bert
Bert Gunter
"The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along
and sticking things into it."
-- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip )
On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 2:29 AM, Rolf Turner <r.tur...@auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
On 23/08/17 18:33, Stefan Evert wrote:
On 23 Aug 2017, at 07:45, Rolf Turner <r.tur...@auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
My reading of ?regex led me to believe that
gsub("[:alpha:]","",x)
should give the result that I want.
That's looking for any of the characters a, l, p, h, : .
OK. I see that now. I don't think that it's really stated anywhere that to
search for (and possibly change) any one of a string of characters you
enclose that string of characters in brackets [ ].
The first example from ?grep makes this "clear" (for some value of the word
"clear") once you understand what this example is on about.
So it's "obvious" once you've been shown, and totally opaque until then.
Well, "obviousness" is in the mind of the beholder, but, from ?regexp:
"A character class is a list of characters enclosed between [ and ]
which matches any single character in that list; "... (at the end of
the above section)
"For example, [[:alnum:]] means [0-9A-Za-z] "...
Note the doubled brackets. So seems pretty explicit to me.
Well, yes. Once it's pointed out it's "obvious". But it's buried
pretty deeply in a large mass of text, and I didn't see it until you
pointed it out.
If *I* had written the help file, it would be much more perspicuous.
cheers,
Rolf
--
Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276
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