R regexpr Function


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.


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


• pattern: regular expression, or string for fixed=TRUE
• text: string, the character vector
• ignore.case: case sensitive or not
• perl: logical. Should perl-compatible regexps be used? Has priority over extended
• 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


> x <- "line 4322: He is now 25 years old, and weights 130lbs"
> y <- regexpr("\\d+",x)
> y

[1] 6
attr(,"match.length")
[1] 4
attr(,"useBytes")
[1] TRUE


> x <- "line 4322: He is now 25 years old, and weights 130lbs"
> y <- regexpr("[[:digit:]]",x)
> y

[1] 6
attr(,"match.length")
[1] 1
attr(,"useBytes")
[1] TRUE


> if (y[[1]][1] != -1) print("match")

[1] "match"


Vector match:

>str <- c("Regular", "expression", "examples of R language")
>x <- regexpr("x*ress",str)
>x

[1] -1 4 -1


Regular Expression Syntax:

Syntax
Description
\\d
Digit, 0,1,2 ... 9
\\D
Not Digit
\\s
Space
\\S
Not Space
\\w
Word
\\W
Not Word
\\t
Tab
\\n
New line
^
Beginning of the string
$
End of the string
\
Escape special characters, e.g. \\ is "\", \+ is "+"
|
Alternation match. e.g. /(e|d)n/ matches "en" and "dn"
Any character, except \n or line terminator
[ab]
a or b
[^ab]
Any character except a and b
[0-9]
All Digit
[A-Z]
All uppercase A to Z letters
[a-z]
All lowercase a to z letters
[A-z]
All Uppercase and lowercase a to z letters
i+
i at least one time
i*
i zero or more times
i?
i zero or 1 time
i{n}
i occurs n times in sequence
i{n1,n2}
i occurs n1 - n2 times in sequence
i{n1,n2}?
non greedy match, see above example
i{n,}
i occures >= n times
[:alnum:]
Alphanumeric characters: [:alpha:] and [:digit:]
[:alpha:]
Alphabetic characters: [:lower:] and [:upper:]
[:blank:]
Blank characters: e.g. space, tab
[:cntrl:]
Control characters
[:digit:]
Digits: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
[:graph:]
Graphical characters: [:alnum:] and [:punct:]
[:lower:]
Lower-case letters in the current locale
[:print:]
Printable characters: [:alnum:], [:punct:] and space
[:punct:]
Punctuation character: ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~
[:space:]
Space characters: tab, newline, vertical tab, form feed, carriage return, space
[:upper:]
Upper-case letters in the current locale
[:xdigit:]
Hexadecimal digits: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F a b c d e f

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