R: Pattern Matching and Replacement

grep {base} | R Documentation

## Pattern Matching and Replacement

### Description

`grep`, `grepl`, `regexpr` and `gregexpr` search for matches to argument `pattern` within each element of a character vector: they differ in the format of and amount of detail in the results.

`sub` and `gsub` perform replacement of the first and all matches respectively.

### Usage

    grep(pattern, x, ignore.case = FALSE, perl = FALSE, value = FALSE,
         fixed = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE, invert = FALSE)

    grepl(pattern, x, ignore.case = FALSE, perl = FALSE,
          fixed = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)

    sub(pattern, replacement, x, ignore.case = FALSE, perl = FALSE,
        fixed = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)

    gsub(pattern, replacement, x, ignore.case = FALSE, perl = FALSE,
         fixed = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)

    regexpr(pattern, text, ignore.case = FALSE, perl = FALSE,
            fixed = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)

    gregexpr(pattern, text, ignore.case = FALSE, perl = FALSE,
             fixed = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)

    regexec(pattern, text, ignore.case = FALSE,
            fixed = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)

### Arguments

`pattern` | character string containing a regular expression (or character string for `fixed = TRUE`) to be matched in the given character vector. Coerced by `as.character` to a character string if possible. If a character vector of length 2 or more is supplied, the first element is used with a warning. Missing values are allowed except for `regexpr` and `gregexpr`.
`x, text` | a character vector where matches are sought, or an object which can be coerced by `as.character` to a character vector.
`ignore.case` | if `FALSE`, the pattern matching is case sensitive and if `TRUE`, case is ignored during matching.
`perl` | logical. Should perl-compatible regexps be used?
`value` | if `FALSE`, a vector containing the (`integer`) indices of the matches determined by `grep` is returned, and if `TRUE`, a vector containing the matching elements themselves is returned.
`fixed` | logical. If `TRUE`, `pattern` is a string to be matched as is. Overrides all conflicting arguments.
`useBytes` | logical. If `TRUE` the matching is done byte-by-byte rather than character-by-character. See ‘Details’.
`invert` | logical. If `TRUE` return indices or values for elements that do not match.
`replacement` | a replacement for matched pattern in `sub` and `gsub`. Coerced to character if possible. For `fixed = FALSE` this can include backreferences `"\1"` to `"\9"` to parenthesized subexpressions of `pattern`. For `perl = TRUE` only, it can also contain `"\U"` or `"\L"` to convert the rest of the replacement to upper or lower case and `"\E"` to end case conversion. If a character vector of length 2 or more is supplied, the first element is used with a warning. If `NA`, all elements in the result corresponding to matches will be set to `NA`.

### Details

Arguments which should be character strings or character vectors are coerced to character if possible.

Each of these functions (apart from `regexec`, which currently does not support Perl-style regular expressions) operates in one of three modes:

1. `fixed = TRUE`: use exact matching.

2. `perl = TRUE`: use Perl-style regular expressions.

3. `fixed = FALSE, perl = FALSE`: use POSIX 1003.2 extended regular expressions.

See the help pages on regular expression for details of the different types of regular expressions.

The two `*sub` functions differ only in that `sub` replaces only the first occurrence of a `pattern` whereas `gsub` replaces all occurrences. If `replacement` contains backreferences which are not defined in `pattern` the result is undefined (but most often the backreference is taken to be `""`).

For `regexpr`, `gregexpr` and `regexec` it is an error for `pattern` to be `NA`, otherwise `NA` is permitted and gives an `NA` match.

The main effect of `useBytes` is to avoid errors/warnings about invalid inputs and spurious matches in multibyte locales, but for `regexpr` it changes the interpretation of the output. It inhibits the conversion of inputs with marked encodings, and is forced if any input is found which is marked as `"bytes"`.

Caseless matching does not make much sense for bytes in a multibyte locale, and you should expect it only to work for ASCII characters if `useBytes = TRUE`.

As from R 2.14.0, `regexpr` and `gregexpr` with `perl = TRUE` allow Python-style named captures.

### Value

`grep(value = FALSE)` returns an integer vector of the indices of the elements of `x` that yielded a match (or not, for `invert = TRUE`.

`grep(value = TRUE)` returns a character vector containing the selected elements of `x` (after coercion, preserving names but no other attributes).

`grepl` returns a logical vector (match or not for each element of `x`).

For `sub` and `gsub` return a character vector of the same length and with the same attributes as `x` (after possible coercion to character). Elements of character vectors `x` which are not substituted will be returned unchanged (including any declared encoding). If `useBytes = FALSE` a non-ASCII substituted result will often be in UTF-8 with a marked encoding (e.g. if there is a UTF-8 input, and in a multibyte locale unless `fixed = TRUE`). Such strings can be re-encoded by `enc2native`.

`regexpr` returns an integer vector of the same length as `text` giving the starting position of the first match or -1 if there is none, with attribute `"match.length"`, an integer vector giving the length of the matched text (or -1 for no match). The match positions and lengths are in characters unless `useBytes = TRUE` is used, when they are in bytes. If named capture is used there are further attributes `"capture.start"`, `"capture.length"` and `"capture.names"`.

`gregexpr` returns a list of the same length as `text` each element of which is of the same form as the return value for `regexpr`, except that the starting positions of every (disjoint) match are given.

`regexec` returns a list of the same length as `text` each element of which is either -1 if there is no match, or a sequence of integers with the starting positions of the match and all substrings corresponding to parenthesized subexpressions of `pattern`, with attribute `"match.length"` an integer vector giving the lengths of the matches (or -1 for no match).

### Warning

POSIX 1003.2 mode of `gsub` and `gregexpr` does not work correctly with repeated word-boundaries (e.g. `pattern = "\b"`). Use `perl = TRUE` for such matches (but that may not work as expected with non-ASCII inputs, as the meaning of ‘word’ is system-dependent).

### Performance considerations

If you are doing a lot of regular expression matching, including on very long strings, you will want to consider the options used. Generally PCRE will be faster than the default regular expression engine, and `fixed = TRUE` faster still (especially when each pattern is matched only a few times).

If you are working in a single-byte locale and have marked UTF-8 strings that are representable in that locale, convert them first as just one UTF-8 string will force all the matching to be done in Unicode, which attracts a penalty of around 3x for the default POSIX 1003.2 mode.

If you can make use of `useBytes = TRUE`, the strings will not be checked before matching, and the actual matching will be faster. Often byte-based matching suffices in a UTF-8 locale since byte patterns of one character never match part of another.

### Note

Prior to R 2.11.0 there was an argument `extended` which could be used to select ‘basic’ regular expressions: this was often used when `fixed = TRUE` would be preferable. In the actual implementation (as distinct from the POSIX standard) the only difference was that ?, +, {, |, (, and ) were not interpreted as metacharacters.

### Source

The C code for POSIX-style regular expression matching has changed over the years. As from R 2.10.0 the TRE library of Ville Laurikari (http://laurikari.net/tre/) is used. From 2005 to R 2.9.2, code based on `glibc` was used (and before that, code from GNU `grep`). The POSIX standard does give some room for interpretation, especially in the handling of invalid regular expressions and the collation of character ranges, so the results will have changed slightly.

For Perl-style matching PCRE (http://www.pcre.org) is used.

### References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole (`grep`)

### See Also

regular expression (aka `regexp`) for the details of the pattern specification.

`regmatches` for extracting matched substrings based on the results of `regexpr`, `gregexpr` and `regexec`.

`glob2rx` to turn wildcard matches into regular expressions.

`agrep` for approximate matching.

`charmatch`, `pmatch` for partial matching, `match` for matching to whole strings.

`tolower`, `toupper` and `chartr` for character translations.

`apropos` uses regexps and has more examples.

`grepRaw` for matching raw vectors.

### Examples

    grep("[a-z]", letters)

    txt <- c("arm","foot","lefroo", "bafoobar")
    if(length(i <- grep("foo",txt)))
       cat("'foo' appears at least once in\n\t",txt,"\n")
    i # 2 and 4
    txt[i]

    ## Double all 'a' or 'b's;  "\" must be escaped, i.e., 'doubled'
    gsub("([ab])", "\\1_\\1_", "abc and ABC")

    txt <- c("The", "licenses", "for", "most", "software", "are",
      "designed", "to", "take", "away", "your", "freedom",
      "to", "share", "and", "change", "it.",
       "", "By", "contrast,", "the", "GNU", "General", "Public", "License",
       "is", "intended", "to", "guarantee", "your", "freedom", "to",
       "share", "and", "change", "free", "software", "--",
       "to", "make", "sure", "the", "software", "is",
       "free", "for", "all", "its", "users")
    ( i <- grep("[gu]", txt) ) # indices
    stopifnot( txt[i] == grep("[gu]", txt, value = TRUE) )

    ## Note that in locales such as en_US this includes B as the
    ## collation order is aAbBcCdEe ...
    (ot <- sub("[b-e]",".", txt))
    txt[ot != gsub("[b-e]",".", txt)]#- gsub does "global" substitution

    txt[gsub("g","#", txt) !=
        gsub("g","#", txt, ignore.case = TRUE)] # the "G" words

    regexpr("en", txt)

    gregexpr("e", txt)

    ## Using grepl() for filtering
    ## Find functions with argument names matching "warn":
    findArgs <- function(env, pattern) {
      nms <- ls(envir = as.environment(env))
      nms <- nms[is.na(match(nms, c("F","T")))] # <-- work around "checking hack"
      aa <- sapply(nms, function(.) { o <- get(.)
                   if(is.function(o)) names(formals(o)) })
      iw <- sapply(aa, function(a) any(grepl(pattern, a, ignore.case=TRUE)))
      aa[iw]
    }
    findArgs("package:base", "warn")

    ## trim trailing white space
    str <- 'Now is the time      '
    sub(' +$', '', str)  ## spaces only
    sub('[[:space:]]+$', '', str) ## white space, POSIX-style
    sub('\\s+$', '', str, perl = TRUE) ## Perl-style white space

    ## capitalizing
    txt <- "a test of capitalizing"
    gsub("(\\w)(\\w*)", "\\U\\1\\L\\2", txt, perl=TRUE)
    gsub("\\b(\\w)",    "\\U\\1",       txt, perl=TRUE)

    txt2 <- "useRs may fly into JFK or laGuardia"
    gsub("(\\w)(\\w*)(\\w)", "\\U\\1\\E\\2\\U\\3", txt2, perl=TRUE)
     sub("(\\w)(\\w*)(\\w)", "\\U\\1\\E\\2\\U\\3", txt2, perl=TRUE)

    ## named capture
    notables <- c("  Ben Franklin and Jefferson Davis",
                  "\tMillard Fillmore")
    # name groups 'first' and 'last'
    name.rex <- "(?<first>[[:upper:]][[:lower:]]+) (?<last>[[:upper:]][[:lower:]]+)"
    (parsed <- regexpr(name.rex, notables, perl = TRUE))
    gregexpr(name.rex, notables, perl = TRUE)[[2]]
    parse.one <- function(res, result) {
      m <- do.call(rbind, lapply(seq_along(res), function(i) {
        if(result[i] == -1) return("")
        st <- attr(result, "capture.start")[i, ]
        substring(res[i], st, st + attr(result, "capture.length")[i, ] - 1)
      }))
      colnames(m) <- attr(result, "capture.names")
      m
    }
    parse.one(notables, parsed)

    ## Decompose a URL into its components.
    ## Example by LT (http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/regexp.html).
    x <- "http://stat.umn.edu:80/xyz"
    m <- regexec("^(([^:]+)://)?([^:/]+)(:([0-9]+))?(/.*)", x)
    m
    regmatches(x, m)
    ## Element 3 is the protocol, 4 is the host, 6 is the port, and 7
    ## is the path.  We can use this to make a function for extracting the
    ## parts of a URL:
    URL_parts <- function(x) {
        m <- regexec("^(([^:]+)://)?([^:/]+)(:([0-9]+))?(/.*)", x)
        parts <- do.call(rbind,
                         lapply(regmatches(x, m), `[`, c(3L, 4L, 6L, 7L)))
        colnames(parts) <- c("protocol","host","port","path")
        parts
    }
    URL_parts(x)

[Package base version 2.15.1 Index]