Replace Text but not from within a word

On Feb 28, 2017, at 8:36 AM, Jeff Newmiller <jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us> wrote:

For tasks like this, you will probably want to make sure to import the data as character data rather than as a factor.  E.g.

dat <- read.csv( "myfile.csv", header=FALSE, as.is=TRUE )

You can check what you have with the str() function.

text

gsub(" CO$", "", text)

-- 
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

On February 28, 2017 5:19:40 AM PST, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz at me.com> wrote:

On Feb 28, 2017, at 3:38 AM, Harshal Athawale

<pgcim15.harshal at spjimr.org> wrote:

I am new in R.

I have a file. This file contains name of the companies.
'data.frame': 494 obs. of  1 variable:
$ V1: Factor w/ 470 levels "3-d engineering corp",..: 293 134 339 359

143

399 122 447 398 384 ...

Problem: I would like to remove "CO" (As it is the most frequent

word). I

would like "CO" to removed from BOEING CO --> BOEING but not from

SAGINAW

*CO*UNTY INC*. *

text = c("BOEING CO","ENGMANTAYLOR CO","SAGINAW COUNTY INC")

gsub(x = text, pattern = "CO", replacement = "")

[1] "BOEING "       "ENGMANTAYLOR " "SAGINAW UNTY"

Thanks in advance.

- Sam

Hi,

See ?regex and ?grep for some details and examples on how to construct
the expression used for matching, as well as some of the references
therein.

In this case, you want to use something along the lines of:

gsub(" CO$", "", text)

[1] "BOEING"             "ENGMANTAYLOR"       "SAGINAW COUNTY INC"

where the "CO" is preceded by a space and followed by the "$", which is
a special character that indicates the end of the string to be matched.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz