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Dealing with parentheses within variable names

5 messages · Jesus Munoz Serrano, Bert Gunter, arun +1 more

#
Please read ?regex, where it says:

" Any metacharacter with special meaning may be quoted by preceding it
with a backslash. The metacharacters in EREs are . \ | ( ) [ { ^ $ * +
?, but note that whether these have a special meaning depends on the
context. "

So use:
sub("\(\)","", names(dataFrame))

instead.

-- Bert


On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 8:08 AM, Jesus Munoz Serrano
<jesusmunozserrano at gmail.com> wrote:

  
    
#
Oops -- forgot that you have to double the backslashes:

 So use:
 sub("\\(\\)","", names(dataFrame))

-- Bert
On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Bert Gunter <bgunter at gene.com> wrote:

  
    
#
Hi,
You could also try:
gsub("[()]","",names(dataFrame))

set.seed(15)
?datF<- data.frame(sample(1:10,15,replace=TRUE))
?names(datF)<-?? "fBodyGyroskewness()Z"
gsub("[()]","",names(datF))
#[1] "fBodyGyroskewnessZ"


sub("\\(\\)","",names(datF))
#[1] "fBodyGyroskewnessZ"


A.K.

----- Original Message -----
From: Bert Gunter <gunter.berton at gene.com>
To: Jesus Munoz Serrano <jesusmunozserrano at gmail.com>
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 4:25 PM
Subject: Re: [R] Dealing with parentheses within variable names

Oops -- forgot that you have to double the backslashes:

So use:
sub("\\(\\)","", names(dataFrame))

-- Bert
On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Bert Gunter <bgunter at gene.com> wrote:

  
    
#
On 28/02/2013 11:08 AM, Jesus Munoz Serrano wrote:
R shouldn't have trouble with names like that, but a lot of packages 
will (e.g. the ones that construct strings and call parse() on them).  
If you find functions in base R that object to those names, I think we'd 
like to fix them.  If the functions are in contributed packages, your 
mileage may vary.

Duncan Murdoch