Basic text string functions in R
May 18, 2015
Tags: text string
To get the length of a text string (i.e. the number of characters in the string):
nchar()
Using length() would just give you the length of the vector containing the string, which will be 1 if the string is just a single string.
To get the position of a regular expression match(es) in a text string x:
pos = regexpr('pattern', x) # Returns position of 1st match in a string
pos = gregexpr('pattern', x) # Returns positions of every match in a string
To get the position of a regular expression match in a vector x of text strings … Continue Reading