... and here's another perhaps simpler, perhaps more efficient (??) way of doing it using strsplit().Note that it uses the fixed field position, 2, of the bracketed roles. Adjust as needed.
A better solution would be a regex that avoids the loops (here, the sapply) altogether, but I don't know how to do this. Maybe someone cleverer will offer such a solution. txt <-c("Sam, [HadoopAnalyst, DBA, Developer], R46443 ","Jan, DBA, R101", "Mary, [Stats, Designer, R], t14") wh <- grep("\\[.+\\]", txt) spl <- strsplit(txt[wh], "\\[|\\]") txt[wh] <- sapply(spl, function(y) paste0(y[1], gsub(" *, *","-", y[2]), y[-(1:2)])) > txt [1] "Sam, HadoopAnalyst-DBA-Developer, R46443 " [2] "Jan, DBA, R101" [3] "Mary, Stats-Designer-R, t14" 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 Sun, Apr 7, 2019 at 9:55 AM Bert Gunter <bgunter.4...@gmail.com> wrote: > (Note: This follows an earlier mistaken reply just to Duncan) > > Multiple "amens!" to Duncan's comments... > > However: > > Here is a start at my interpretation of how to do what you want. Note > first that your "example" listed 4 fields in the line, but you showed only > 3. I modified your example for 3 text fields, only one of which has > brackets ([...]) in it I assume. Here is a little example of how to use > regex's to replace the commas within the brackets by "-", which would > presumably then allow you to easily convert the text into a data frame e.g. > using textConnection() and read.csv. Obviously, if this is not what you > meant, read no further. > > ##Example > txt <-c("Sam, [HadoopAnalyst, DBA, Developer], R46443 ","Jan, DBA, R101", > "Mary, [Stats, Designer, R], t14") > > wh <- grep("\\[.+\\]",txt) ## which records need to be modified? > fixup <- gsub(" *, *","-",sub(".+(\\[.+\\]).+","\\1",txt[wh])) ## > bracketed expressions, changing "," to "-" > > ## Unfortunately, the "replacement" argument in sub() is not vectorized, > se we need a loop: > > for(i in wh) txt[wh[i]] <- sub("\\[.+\\]",fixup[i],txt[wh[i]]) ## replace > original bracketed text with fixed up bracketed text > > > txt > [1] "Sam, [HadoopAnalyst-DBA-Developer], R46443 " > [2] "Jan, DBA, R101" > [3] "Mary, [HadoopAnalyst-DBA-Developer], t14" > > > 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 Sun, Apr 7, 2019 at 9:00 AM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> On 06/04/2019 10:03 a.m., Amit Govil wrote: >> > Hi, >> > >> > I have a bunch of csv files to read in R. I'm unable to read them >> correctly >> > because in some of the files, there is a column ("Role") which has >> comma in >> > the values. >> > >> > Sample data: >> > >> > User, Role, Rule, GAPId >> > Sam, [HadoopAnalyst, DBA, Developer], R46443 >> > >> > I'm trying to play with the below code but it doesnt work: >> >> Since you didn't give a reproducible example, you should at least say >> what "doesn't work" means. >> >> But here's some general advice: if you want to debug code, don't write >> huge expressions like the chain of functions below, put things in >> temporary variables and make sure you get what you were expecting at >> each stage. >> >> Instead of >> > >> > files <- list.files(pattern='.*REDUNDANT(.*).csv$') >> > >> > tbl <- sapply(files, function(f) { >> > gsub('\\[|\\]', '"', readLines(f)) %>% >> > read.csv(text = ., check.names = FALSE) >> > }) %>% >> > bind_rows(.id = "id") %>% >> > select(id, User, Rule) %>% >> > distinct() >> >> try >> >> >> files <- list.files(pattern='.*REDUNDANT(.*).csv$') >> >> tmp1 <- sapply(files, function(f) { >> gsub('\\[|\\]', '"', readLines(f)) %>% >> read.csv(text = ., check.names = FALSE) >> }) >> >> tmp2 <- tmp1 %>% bind_rows(.id = "id") >> >> tmp3 <- tmp2 %>% select(id, User, Rule) >> >> tbl <- tmp3 %>% distinct() >> >> (You don't need pipes here, but it will make it easier to put the giant >> expression back together at the end.) >> >> Then look at tmp1, tmp2, tmp3 as well as tbl to see where things went >> wrong. >> >> Duncan Murdoch >> >> ______________________________________________ >> 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. >> > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.