Extract or Replace Matched Substrings

Description

Extract or replace matched substrings from match data obtained by regexpr, gregexpr, regexec or gregexec.

Usage

regmatches(x, m, invert = FALSE)
regmatches(x, m, invert = FALSE) <- value

Arguments

Details

If invert is FALSE (default), regmatches extracts the matched substrings as specified by the match data. For vector match data (as obtained from regexpr), empty matches are dropped; for list match data, empty matches give empty components (zero-length character vectors).

If invert is TRUE, regmatches extracts the non-matched substrings, i.e., the strings are split according to the matches similar to strsplit (for vector match data, at most a single split is performed).

If invert is NA, regmatches extracts both non-matched and matched substrings, always starting and ending with a non-match (empty if the match occurred at the beginning or the end, respectively).

Note that the match data can be obtained from regular expression matching on a modified version of x with the same numbers of characters.

The replacement function can be used for replacing the matched or non-matched substrings. For vector match data, if invert is FALSE, value should be a character vector with length the number of matched elements in m. Otherwise, it should be a list of character vectors with the same length as m, each as long as the number of replacements needed. Replacement coerces values to character or list and generously recycles values as needed. Missing replacement values are not allowed.

Value

For regmatches, a character vector with the matched substrings if m is a vector and invert is FALSE. Otherwise, a list with the matched or/and non-matched substrings.

For regmatches<-, the updated character vector.

Examples

x <- c("A and B", "A, B and C", "A, B, C and D", "foobar")
pattern <- "[[:space:]]*(,|and)[[:space:]]"
## Match data from regexpr()
m <- regexpr(pattern, x)
regmatches(x, m)
regmatches(x, m, invert = TRUE)
## Match data from gregexpr()
m <- gregexpr(pattern, x)
regmatches(x, m)
regmatches(x, m, invert = TRUE)

## Consider
x <- "John (fishing, hunting), Paul (hiking, biking)"
## Suppose we want to split at the comma (plus spaces) between the
## persons, but not at the commas in the parenthesized hobby lists.
## One idea is to "blank out" the parenthesized parts to match the
## parts to be used for splitting, and extract the persons as the
## non-matched parts.
## First, match the parenthesized hobby lists.
m <- gregexpr("\\([^)]*\\)", x)
## Create blank strings with given numbers of characters.
blanks <- function(n) strrep(" ", n)
## Create a copy of x with the parenthesized parts blanked out.
s <- x
regmatches(s, m) <- Map(blanks, lapply(regmatches(s, m), nchar))
s
## Compute the positions of the split matches (note that we cannot call
## strsplit() on x with match data from s).
m <- gregexpr(", *", s)
## And finally extract the non-matched parts.
regmatches(x, m, invert = TRUE)

## regexec() and gregexec() return overlapping ranges because the
## first match is the full match.  This conflicts with regmatches()<-
## and regmatches(..., invert=TRUE).  We can work-around by dropping
## the first match.
drop_first <- function(x) {
    if(!anyNA(x) && all(x > 0)) {
        ml <- attr(x, 'match.length')
        if(is.matrix(x)) x <- x[-1,] else x <- x[-1]
        attr(x, 'match.length') <- if(is.matrix(ml)) ml[-1,] else ml[-1]
    }
    x
}
m <- gregexec("(\\w+) \\(((?:\\w+(?:, )?)+)\\)", x)
regmatches(x, m)
try(regmatches(x, m, invert=TRUE))
regmatches(x, lapply(m, drop_first))
## invert=TRUE loses matrix structure because we are retrieving what
## is in between every sub-match
regmatches(x, lapply(m, drop_first), invert=TRUE)
y <- z <- x
## Notice **list**(...) on the RHS
regmatches(y, lapply(m, drop_first)) <- list(c("<NAME>", "<HOBBY-LIST>"))
y
regmatches(z, lapply(m, drop_first), invert=TRUE) <-
    list(sprintf("<%d>", 1:5))
z

## With `perl = TRUE` and `invert = FALSE` capture group names
## are preserved.  Collect functions and arguments in calls:
NEWS <- head(readLines(file.path(R.home(), 'doc', 'NEWS.2')), 100)
m <- gregexec("(?<fun>\\w+)\\((?<args>[^)]*)\\)", NEWS, perl = TRUE)
y <- regmatches(NEWS, m)
y[[16]]
## Make tabular, adding original line numbers
mdat <- as.data.frame(t(do.call(cbind, y)))
mdat <- cbind(mdat, line=rep(seq_along(y), lengths(y) / ncol(mdat)))
head(mdat)
NEWS[head(mdat[['line']])]