This tutorial was adapted from the materials from STAT 545 at the University of British Columbia, a course in data wrangling, exploration, and analysis with R. We will use data from Gapminder as our example to demonstrate using regular expression in R. All solutions are at the end of this file. We load the stringr package, read in the Gapminder data, and also define a vector of strings of hypothetical filenames.

library(stringr)
files <- c("block0_dplyr-fake.rmd", "block000_dplyr-fake.rmd.txt", "gapminderDataFiveYear.txt",
"regex.html", "regex.md", "regex.R", "regex.Rmd", "regex.Rpres",
"xblock000_dplyr-fake.rmd")

## Regular expression syntax

Regular expressions typically specify characters (or character classes) to seek out, possibly with information about repeats and location within the string. This is accomplished with the help of metacharacters that have specific meaning: $* + . ? [ ] ^ { } | ( ) \. We will use some small examples to introduce regular expression syntax and what these metacharacters mean. ### Escape sequences There are some special characters in R that cannot be directly coded in a string. For example, apostrophes. Apostrophes can be used in R to define strings (as well as quotation marks). For example name <- 'Cote d'Ivore'' will return an error. When we want to use an apostrophe as an apostrophe and not a string delimiter, we need to use the “escape” character \'. You would have to “escape” the single quote in the pattern, by preceding it with , so it’s clear it is not part of the string-specifying machinery. So name <- 'Cote d\'Ivore'' will work. Let’s search the country names for those with an apostrophe: grep('\'', levels(gDat$country))
grep('\'', levels(gDat$country), value = TRUE) str_detect(levels(gDat$country), '\'')
str_detect(levels(gDat$country), '\'') %>% levels(gDat$country)[.]

There are other characters in R that require escaping, and this rule applies to all string functions in R, including regular expressions:

• \': single quote. You don’t need to escape single quote inside a double-quoted string, so we can also use "'" in the previous example.
• \": double quote. Similarly, double quotes can be used inside a single-quoted string, i.e. '"'.
• \n: newline.
• \r: carriage return.
• \t: tab character.

### Quantifiers

Quantifiers specify how many repetitions of the pattern.

• *: matches at least 0 times.
• +: matches at least 1 times.
• ?: matches at most 1 times.
• {n}: matches exactly n times.
• {n,}: matches at least n times.
• {n,m}: matches between n and m times.

Run the following while taking the time to understand the logic:

strings <- c("a", "ab", "acb", "accb", "acccb", "accccb")
strings
grep("ac*b", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("ac+b", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("ac?b", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("ac{2}b", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("ac{2,}b", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("ac{2,3}b", strings, value = TRUE)
stringr::str_extract_all(strings, "ac{2,3}b", simplify = TRUE)

#### Exercise

Using quantifiers find all countries with ee, but not eee, in its name

### Position of pattern within the string

• ^: matches the start of the string.
• $: matches the end of the string. • \b: matches the empty string at either edge of a word. Don’t confuse it with ^$ which marks the edge of a string.
• \B: matches the empty string provided it is not at an edge of a word.

For the last example, \b is not a recognized escape character, so we need to double slash it \\b.

strings <- c("abcd", "cdab", "cabd", "c abd")
strings
grep("ab", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("^ab", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("ab$", strings, value = TRUE) grep("\\bab", strings, value = TRUE) #### Exercise Find the string of country names that • Start with “South” • End in “land” • Have a word in its name that starts with “Ga” ### Character classes Character classes allows to – surprise! – specify entire classes of characters, such as numbers, letters, etc. There are two flavors of character classes, one uses [: and :] around a predefined name inside square brackets and the other uses \ and a special character. They are sometimes interchangeable. • [:digit:] or \d: digits, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9, equivalent to [0-9]. • \D: non-digits, equivalent to [^0-9]. • [:lower:]: lower-case letters, equivalent to [a-z]. • [:upper:]: upper-case letters, equivalent to [A-Z]. • [:alpha:]: alphabetic characters, equivalent to [[:lower:][:upper:]] or [A-z]. • [:alnum:]: alphanumeric characters, equivalent to [[:alpha:][:digit:]] or [A-z0-9]. • \w: word characters, equivalent to [[:alnum:]_] or [A-z0-9_]. • \W: not word, equivalent to [^A-z0-9_]. • [:xdigit:]: hexadecimal digits (base 16), 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F a b c d e f, equivalent to [0-9A-Fa-f]. • [:blank:]: blank characters, i.e. space and tab. • [:space:]: space characters: tab, newline, vertical tab, form feed, carriage return, space. • \s: space,  . • \S: not space. • [:punct:]: punctuation characters, ! " #$ % & ’ ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [  ] ^ _  { | } ~.
• [:graph:]: graphical (human readable) characters: equivalent to [[:alnum:][:punct:]].
• [:print:]: printable characters, equivalent to [[:alnum:][:punct:]\\s].
• [:cntrl:]: control characters, like \n or \r, [\x00-\x1F\x7F].

Note:

• [:...:] has to be used inside square brackets, e.g. [[:digit:]].
• \ itself is a special character that needs escape, e.g. \\d. Do not confuse these regular expressions with R escape sequences such as \t.

#### Exercise

• Find all countries that use punctuation in its name
• Rewrite the clean.text() function from HW04 that takes in a string and
• keeps only alpha-numeric characters
• removes all spaces
• converts to lower case and returns it the newly formatted string. For example clean.text("Coeur d'Alene") should return coeurdalene
clean.text <- function(string){

return(string)
}

• .: matches any single character, as shown in the first example.
• [...]: a character list, matches any one of the characters inside the square brackets. We can also use - inside the brackets to specify a range of characters.
• [^...]: an inverted character list, similar to [...], but matches any characters except those inside the square brackets.
• \: suppress the special meaning of metacharacters in regular expression, i.e. $* + . ? [ ] ^ { } | ( ) \, similar to its usage in escape sequences. Since \ itself needs to be escaped in R, we need to escape these metacharacters with double backslash like \\$.
• |: an “or” operator, matches patterns on either side of the |.
• (...): grouping in regular expressions. This allows you to retrieve the bits that matched various parts of your regular expression so you can alter them or use them for building up a new string. Each group can than be refer using \\N, with N being the No. of (...) used. This is called backreference.
strings <- c("^ab", "ab", "abc", "abd", "abe", "ab 12")
strings
grep("ab.", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("ab[c-e]", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("ab[^c]", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("^ab", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("\\^ab", strings, value = TRUE)
grep("abc|abd", strings, value = TRUE)
gsub("(ab) 12", "\\1 34", strings)

#### Exercise

Find countries in Gapminder with letter i or t, and ends with land, and replace land with LAND using backreference.

## [1] "FinLAND"     "IceLAND"     "IreLAND"     "SwaziLAND"   "SwitzerLAND"
## [6] "ThaiLAND"

## Solutions

# Countries with ee but not eee
grep("e{2}", levels(gDat$country), value = TRUE) # Countries grep("^South", levels(gDat$country), value = TRUE)
grep("land$", levels(gDat$country), value = TRUE)
grep("\\bGa", levels(gDat$country), value = TRUE) # Function to clean text clean.text <- function(text){ text <- gsub("[^[:alnum:]]", "", text) text <- gsub(" ", "", text) text <- tolower(text) return(text) } # Punctuation in its name grep("[[:punct:]]", levels(gDat$country), value = TRUE)

# Backreference
countries <- gsub("(.*[it].*)land$", "\\1LAND", levels(gDat$country), ignore.case = T)
grep("LAND", countries, value = TRUE)`