String Manipulation

In computer science a (character) string is any finite sequence of characters (i.e., letters, numerals, symbols and punctuation marks).

In R they are denoted with double quotation marks.

Like handling dates, handling text is a non-glamorous but necessary task. The stringr package tries to alleviate this problem.

stringr simplifies string operations by eliminating options that you don’t need 95% of the time. i.e. not the most powerful, but tradeoff is gain in simplicity.

If ever you need to do very advanced string manipulations, languages like Python and Ruby are better suited for the task.

stringr uses consistent function names and arguments i.e. almost all functions in the stringr package start with str_.

So if you forget a function, type str_ in the console and press TAB to get a list of auto-completions.

• stringr provides pattern matching functions to str
  • _detect
  • _locate
  • _extract
  • _match
  • _replace
  • _split
• Note that many of these funcitions also have an _all version. See str_replace() and str_replace_all