I don't now whether or not this is less "kludgy" than the explicit loop (loops are implicitly used anyway), but
Reduce(function(x1,x2)gsub(x2,"something else",x1),x, init=y) does it using gsub. Note, however, that this will **not** work if the "something else" regular expression itself contained elements of x in the "wrong" order. I leave it as an exercise to figure out why not. Note also that this is almost certainly less efficient than your "kludgy" loop, too. Cheers, Bert Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics -----Original Message----- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Christian Raschke Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 10:20 AM To: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] gsub patterns from vector elements w/out loop? Marianne, The function substring2 from the Hmisc packages works nicely for me to do this (without explicit gsub, though): x<- c("one","two") y<- paste(rep(x,2),"blah") y [1] "one blah" "two blah" "one blah" "two blah" substring2(y,x)<- "something else" y [1] "something else blah" "something else blah" "something else blah" "something else blah" Christian On 02/22/2010 10:25 AM, Marianne Promberger wrote: > Dear list, > > I have two vectors: > > x<- c("one","two") > y<- paste(rep(x,2),"blah") > > I want to replace all occurrences of each element of x in y with > something else, so that y looks like this: > > y > [1] "something else blah" "something else blah" "something else blah" > [4] "something else blah" > > I can do this using a loop: > > for ( i in 1:length(x) ) { > y<- gsub(x[i],"something else",y) > } > > Surely, there must be a less kludgy way? > > I tried looking at the different apply()s but am not getting anywhere, > partly because I lack the mental flexibility to combine the fact that > I am applying gsub() to y but now want to apply that to x ... erm. :/ > > Marianne > > -- Christian Raschke Department of Economics and ISDS Research Lab (HSRG) Louisiana State University Patrick Taylor Hall, Rm 2128 Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (225)226-0017 cras...@lsu.edu ______________________________________________ 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.
