Extract text using regex in R

Question

I read the text file with below data and am trying to convert it to a dataframe

Id:   1
ASIN: 0827229534
  title: Patterns of Preaching: A Sermon Sampler
  group         


        

Answer 1

This is just a start. Since im not a pro in regExp I will let others do the magic. :)

Either you define the rules for every object and do something like this.

ids <- do.call(rbind, regmatches(regexec(pattern = 'Id:\\s+', text = text), x = text))
ASIN <- do.call(rbind, regmatches(regexec(pattern = 'ASIN:\\s+', text = text), x = text))
title <- do.call(rbind, regmatches(regexec(pattern = 'title:\\s+', text = text), x = text))

Or you define a general rule, which should work for every line. Something like this:

sapply(text,  FUN = function(x) {
  regmatches(x, regexec(text = x, pattern = "([^:]+)"))
  })

sapply(text,  FUN = function(x) {
  regmatches(x, regexec(text = x, pattern = "(:.*)"))
})