Message-ID: <16987.51689.900870.284564@stat.math.ethz.ch>
Date: 2005-04-12T13:15:21Z
From: Martin Maechler
Subject: removing characters from a string
In-Reply-To: <20050412125455.86170.qmail@web31301.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
>>>>> "Vivek" == Vivek Rao <rvivekrao at yahoo.com>
>>>>> on Tue, 12 Apr 2005 05:54:55 -0700 (PDT) writes:
Vivek> Is there a simple way in R to remove all characters
Vivek> from a string other than those in a specified set? For
Vivek> example, I want to keep only the digits 0-9 in a
Vivek> string.
Vivek> In general, I have found the string handling abilities
Vivek> of R a bit limited. (Of course it's great for stats in
Vivek> general). Is there a good reference on this? Or should
Vivek> R programmers dump their output to a text file and use
Vivek> something like Perl or Python for sophisticated text
Vivek> processing?
Vivek> I am familiar with the basic functions such as nchar,
Vivek> substring, as.integer, print, cat, sprintf etc.
It depends on your "etc":
The above is pretty trivial using gsub(),
but since you sound sophisticated enough to proclaim missing R
abilities, I leave the exercise to you.
Martin