R: Pattern Matching and Replacement

grep {base} | R Documentation

## Pattern Matching and Replacement

### Description

`grep`, `grepl`, `regexpr`, `gregexpr` and `regexec` 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, perl = 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`, `gregexpr` and `regexec`.
`x, text` | a character vector where matches are sought, or an object which can be coerced by `as.character` to a character vector. Long vectors are supported.
`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 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 (the default).

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.

Both `grep` and `grepl` take missing values in `x` as not matching a non-missing `pattern`.

The main effect of `useBytes = TRUE` 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"` (see `Encoding`).

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`.

`regexpr` and `gregexpr` with `perl = TRUE` allow Python-style named captures, but not for long vector inputs.

Invalid inputs in the current locale are warned about up to 5 times.

Caseless matching with `perl = TRUE` for non-ASCII characters depends on the PCRE library being compiled with ‘Unicode property support’, which PCRE2 is by default.

### Value

`grep(value = FALSE)` returns a vector of the indices of the elements of `x` that yielded a match (or not, for `invert = TRUE`). This will be an integer vector unless the input is a long vector, when it will be a double vector.

`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`).

`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 (as they are for ASCII-only matching: in either case an attribute `useBytes` with value `TRUE` is set on the result). 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"` a vector giving the lengths of the matches (or -1 for no match). The interpretation of positions and length and the attributes follows `regexpr`.

Where matching failed because of resource limits (especially for `perl = TRUE`) this is regarded as a non-match, usually with a warning.

### Warning

The 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 `perl = TRUE` 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.

PCRE-based matching by default used to put additional effort into ‘studying’ the compiled pattern when `x`/`text` has length 10 or more. That study may use the PCRE JIT compiler on platforms where it is available (see `pcre_config`). As from PCRE2 (PCRE version >= 10.00 as reported by `extSoftVersion`), there is no study phase, but the patterns are optimized automatically when possible, and PCRE JIT is used when enabled. The details are controlled by `options` `PCRE_study` and `PCRE_use_JIT`. (Some timing comparisons can be seen by running file ‘tests/PCRE.R’ in the R sources (and perhaps installed).) People working with PCRE and very long strings can adjust the maximum size of the JIT stack by setting environment variable R_PCRE_JIT_STACK_MAXSIZE before JIT is used to a value between `1` and `1000` in MB: the default is `64`. When JIT is not used with PCRE version < 10.30 (that is with PCRE1 and old versions of PCRE2), it might also be wise to set the option `PCRE_limit_recursion`.

### Note

Aspects will be platform-dependent as well as local-dependent: for example the implementation of character classes (except `[:digit:]` and `[:xdigit:]`). One can expect results to be consistent for ASCII inputs and when working in UTF-8 mode (when most platforms will use Unicode character tables, although those are updated frequently and subject to some degree of interpretation – is a circled capital letter alphabetic or a symbol?). However, results in 8-bit encodings can differ considerably between platforms, modes and from the UTF-8 versions.

### Source

The C code for POSIX-style regular expression matching has changed over the years. As from R 2.10.0 (Oct 2009) the TRE library of Ville Laurikari (https://github.com/laurikari/tre) is used. 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 over the years.

For Perl-style matching PCRE2 or PCRE (https://www.pcre.org) is used: again the results may depend (slightly) on the version of PCRE in use.

### 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, `startsWith` for matching of initial parts of strings.

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

`apropos` uses regexps and has more examples.

`grepRaw` for matching raw vectors.

Options `PCRE_limit_recursion`, `PCRE_study` and `PCRE_use_JIT`.

`extSoftVersion` for the versions of regex and PCRE libraries in use, `pcre_config` for more details for PCRE.

### 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 for some implementations character ranges are
    ## locale-dependent (but not currently).  Then [b-e] in locales such as
    ## en_US may include B as the collation order is aAbBcCdDe ...
    (ot <- sub("[b-e]",".", txt))
    txt[ot != gsub("[b-e]",".", txt)]#- gsub does "global" substitution
    ## In caseless matching, ranges include both cases:
    a <- grep("[b-e]", txt, value = TRUE)
    b <- grep("[b-e]", txt, ignore.case = TRUE, value = TRUE)
    setdiff(b, a)

    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(" +$", "", str)  ## spaces only
    ## what is considered 'white space' depends on the locale.
    sub("[[:space:]]+$", "", str) ## white space, POSIX-style
    ## what PCRE considered white space changed in version 8.34: see ?regex
    sub("\\s+$", "", str, perl = TRUE) ## PCRE-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)

    ## There is no gregexec() yet, but one can emulate it by running
    ## regexec() on the regmatches obtained via gregexpr().  E.g.:
    pattern <- "([[:alpha:]]+)([[:digit:]]+)"
    s <- "Test: A1 BC23 DEF456"
    lapply(regmatches(s, gregexpr(pattern, s)),
           function(e) regmatches(e, regexec(pattern, e)))

[Package base version 4.0.5 Index]