Laura Rodriguez Murillo wrote: > Thank you. I think grep would do it, but the list of expressions I > need to match is too long so they are stored in a file.
what does 'too long' mean? > So the > question would be how I can tell R to look into that file to look for > the expressions that I want to match. > i guess you may still successfully use r for this, but to me it sounds like a perfect job for perl. let me know if you need more help. note, in the below, you'd use 'data[,2]' instead of 'd[,2]' (or 'd' instead of 'data'). sorry for the typo. mark, thanks for pointing this out -- the more obvious the mistake, the less visible ;) vQ > Thank you again for your help > > Laura > > 2009/2/6 Wacek Kusnierczyk <waclaw.marcin.kusnierc...@idi.ntnu.no>: > >> Laura Rodriguez Murillo wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> I'm new in the mailing list but I would appreciate if you could help >>> me with this: >>> I have a big matrix from where I need to delete specific rows. The >>> second entry on these rows to delete should match any string within a >>> list (other file with just one column). >>> Thank you so much! >>> >>> >>> >> here's one way to do it, illustrated with dummy data: >> >> # dummy character matrix >> data = matrix(replicate(20, paste(sample(letters, 20), collapse="")), >> ncol=2) >> >> # filter out rows where second column does not match 'a' >> data[-grep('a', d[,2]),] >> >> this will work also if your data is actually a data frame: >> >> data = as.data.frame(data) >> data[-grep('a', d[,2]),] >> >> note, due to a known issue with grep, this won't work correctly if there >> are *no* rows that do *not* match the pattern: >> >> data[-grep('1', d[,2]),] >> # should return all of data, but returns an empty matrix >> >> with the upcoming version of r, grep will have an additional argument >> which will make this problem easy to fix: >> >> data[grep('a', d[,2], invert=TRUE),] >> >> >> vQ ______________________________________________ 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.