Replace entire expression that contains a specific string

Question

I have data frame that has a column with large number of file names like:

d <- c(\"harry11_scott80_norm.avi\",\"harry11_norm.avi\",\"harry11_scott80_lpf.         


        

Answer 1

Here's one way

> gsub(".*_scott80_.*", "incongruent", d)
[1] "incongruent"           "harry11_norm.avi"      "incongruent"          
[4] "joel51_lpf.avi"        "rich82_joel51_lpf.avi"

Or with grep

> d[grep("_scott80_", d)] <- "incongruent"
> d
[1] "incongruent"           "harry11_norm.avi"      "incongruent"          
[4] "joel51_lpf.avi"        "rich82_joel51_lpf.avi"

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To address your edit, I believe this will do it (using | to mean "or")

gsub(".*(_scott80_|_harry11_).*", "incongruent", d)

Of course, you don't have any strings in d that match "_harry11_"

Answer 2

If your filenames are all of the same format, that is those with two names i.e harry11_scott80_norm.avi always have two underscores, and those with one name i.e. harry11_norm.avi always have one underscore, you can quickly use something like this to rename your files:

d = gsub(".*_.*_.*", "incongruent", d)
> d
[1] "incongruent"      "harry11_norm.avi" "incongruent"      "joel51_lpf.avi"  
[5] "incongruent"

d =gsub(".*_.*","congruent",d)
> d
[1] "incongruent" "congruent"   "incongruent" "congruent"   "incongruent"