问题
Let's say I have a long character string: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. I'd like to use stringr::str_replace_all
to replace certain letters with others. According to the documentation, str_replace_all
can take a named vector and replaces the name with the value. That works fine for 1 replacement, but for multiple it seems to do it iteratively, so the result is a replacement of the prelast iteration. I'm not sure this is the intended behaviour.
library(tidyverse)
text_string = "developer"
text_string %>%
str_replace_all(c(e ="X")) #this works fine
[1] "dXvXlopXr"
text_string %>%
str_replace_all(c(e ="p", p = "e")) #not intended behaviour
[1] "develoeer"
Desired result:
[1] "dpvploepr"
Which I get by introducing a new character:
text_string %>%
str_replace_all(c(e ="X", p = "e", X = "p"))
It's a usable workaround but hardly generalisable. Is this a bug or are my expectations wrong?
I'd like to also be able to replace n letters with n other letters simultaneously, preferably using either two vectors (like "old" and "new") or a named vector as input.
reprex edited for easier human reading
回答1:
I'm working on a package to deal with the type of problem. This is safer than the qdap::mgsub
function because it does not rely on placeholders. It fully supports regex as the matching and the replacement. You provide a named list where the names are the strings to match on and their value is the replacement.
devtools::install_github("bmewing/mgsub")
library(mgsub)
mgsub("developer",list("e" ="p", "p" = "e"))
#> [1] "dpvploepr"
qdap::mgsub(c("e","p"),c("p","e"),"developer")
#> [1] "dpvploppr"
回答2:
My workaround would be to take advantage of the fact that str_replace_all can take functions as an input for the replacement.
library(stringr)
text_string = "developer"
pattern <- "p|e"
fun <- function(query) {
if(query == "e") y <- "p"
if(query == "p") y <- "e"
return(y)
}
str_replace_all(text_string, pattern, fun)
Of course, if you need to scale up, I would suggest to use a more sophisticated function.
回答3:
There is probably an order in what the function does, so after replacing all c by s, you replace all s by c, only c remains .. try this :
long_string %>% str_replace_all(c(c ="X", s = "U")) %>% str_replace_all(c(X ="s", U = "c"))
回答4:
The iterative behavior is intended. That said, we can use write our own workaround. I am going to use character subsetting for the replacement.
In a named vector, we can look up things by name and get a replacement value for each name. This is like doing all the replacement simultaneously.
rules <- c(a = "X", b = "Y", X = "a")
chars <- c("a", "a", "b", "X", "X")
rules[chars]
#> a a b X X
#> "X" "X" "Y" "a" "a"
So here, looking up "a"
in the rules
vector gets us "X"
, effectively replacing "a"
with "X"
. The same goes for the other characters.
One problem is that names without a match yield NA
.
rules <- c(a = "X", b = "Y", X = "a")
chars <- c("a", "Y", "Z")
rules[chars]
#> a <NA> <NA>
#> "X" NA NA
To prevent the NAs from appearing, we can expand the rules to include any new characters so that a character is replaced by itself.
rules <- c(a = "X", b = "Y", X = "a")
chars <- c("a", "Y", "Z")
no_rule <- chars[! chars %in% names(rules)]
rules2 <- c(rules, setNames(no_rule, no_rule))
rules2[chars]
#> a Y Z
#> "X" "Y" "Z"
And that's the logic behind the following function.
- Break strings to characters
- Create a full list of replacement rules
- Look up replacement values
- Glue strings back together
library(stringr)
str_replace_chars <- function(string, rules) {
# Expand rules to replace characters with themselves
# if those characters do not have a replacement rule
chars <- unique(unlist(strsplit(string, "")))
complete_rules <- setNames(chars, chars)
complete_rules[names(rules)] <- rules
# Split each string into characters, replace and unsplit
for (string_i in seq_along(string)) {
chars_i <- unlist(strsplit(string[string_i], ""))
string[string_i] <- paste0(complete_rules[chars_i], collapse = "")
}
string
}
rules <- c(a = "X", p = "e", e = "p")
string <- c("application", "developer")
str_replace_chars(string, rules)
#> [1] "XeelicXtion" "dpvploepr"
来源:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48169135/str-replace-all-replacing-named-vector-elements-iteratively-not-all-at-once