search for string insider a string

That works.  I want the position just for the purpose of my later manual check.  Thanks a lot Gabor.

-----Original Message-----
From: Gabor Grothendieck [mailto:ggrothendieck at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 2:18 PM
To: Tan, Richard
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] search for string insider a string

Try this.  We use regexpr to get the positions and strapply puts the values in list s.  The unlist statement converts NULL to NA and simplifies the list, s, to a numeric vector.  For more info on strapply see http://gsubfn.googlecode.com

library(gsubfn)  # strapply

x <- c"test1", "bcdtestblabla2.1bla", "cdtestblablabla3.88blabla")

dtest.info <- cbind(posn = regexpr("dtest", x),
   value = { s <- strapply(x, "dtest[^0-9]*([0-9][0-9.]*)", as.numeric)
                unlist(ifelse(sapply(s, length), s, NA))
})

# the above may be sufficient but
# if its important to NA out rows with no match add 
dtest.info[dtest.info[,1] < 0,] <- NA dtest.info

pos value
[1,]  NA    NA
[2,]   3  2.10
[3,]   2  3.88

Why do you want the position?   Is there a further transformation needed?
What is it?  There may be even easier approaches to the entire problem.

Hi, sorry if it is a too stupid question, but how do I a string search 
in R:

I have a dataframe A with A$test like:

test1
bcdtestblabla2.1bla
cdtestblablabla3.88blabla

and I want to search for string that start with 'dtest' and ends with 
number and return the location of that substring and the number, so 
the end result would be:

NA ? ?NA
3 ? ?2.1
2 ? ?3.88

I find grep can probably do this but I am new to the function so would 
like a good example.

Thanks,
Richard



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