protectSpecChar {wrMisc}

Protect Special Characters

Description

Some characters do have a special meaning when used with regular expressions. This concerns characters like a point, parinthesis, backslash etc. Thus, when using grep or any related command, shuch special characters must get protected in order to get considered as they are.

Usage

protectSpecChar(
  x,
  prot = c(".", "\\", "|", "(", ")", "[", "{", "^", "$", "*", "+", "?"),
  silent = TRUE,
  debug = FALSE,
  callFrom = NULL
)

Arguments

x

character vector to be prepared for use in regular expressions

prot

(character) collection of characters that need to be protected

silent

(logical) suppress messages

debug

(logical) additional messages for debugging

callFrom

(character) allow easier tracking of messages produced

Value

This function returns a modified character vector

Examples

aa <- c("abc","abcde","ab.c","ab.c.e","ab*c","ab\\d")
grepl("b.", aa)             # all TRUE
grepl("b\\.", aa)           # manual prootection
grepl(protectSpecChar("b."), aa)