Pattern replacement with multiple patterns

Pattern replacement with multiple patterns

gsubs(
  pattern,
  replacement,
  x,
  ignore.case = TRUE,
  replaceMultiple = rep(TRUE, length(pattern)),
  ...
)

Arguments

pattern

character vector of patterns

replacement

character vector of replacements

x

character vector with input data to be curated

ignore.case

logical indicating whether to perform pattern matching in case-insensitive manner, where ignore.case=TRUE will ignore the uppercase/lowercase distinction.

...

additional arguments are passed to base::gsub() or base::sub().

replace_multiple

logical vector indicating whether to perform global substitution, where replace_multiple=FALSE will only replace the first occurrence of the pattern, using base::sub(). Note that this vector can refer to individual entries in pattern.

Value

character vector when input x is an atomic vector, or list when input x is a list.

Details

This function is a simple wrapper around base::gsub() when considering a series of pattern-replacement combinations. It applies each pattern match and replacement in order and is therefore not vectorized.

When x input is a list each vector in the list is processed, somewhat differently than processing one vector.

1. When the list contains another list, or when length(x) < 100, each value in x is iterated calling gsubs(). This process is the slowest option, however not noticeble until x has length over 10,000.

2. When the list does not contain another list and all values are non-factor, or all values are factor, they are unlisted, processed as a vector, then relisted. This process is nearly the same speed as processing one single vector, except the time it takes to confirm the list element classes.

3. When values contain a mix of non-factor and factor values, they are separately unlisted, processed by gsubs(), then relisted and combined afterward. Again, this process is only slightly slower than option 2 above, given that it calls gsubs() twice, with two vectors.

4. Note that factor values at input are replaced with character values at output, consistent with gsub().

See also

Other jam string functions: asSize(), breaksByVector(), cPasteSU(), cPasteS(), cPasteUnique(), cPasteU(), cPaste(), fillBlanks(), formatInt(), gsubOrdered(), makeNames(), mixedOrder(), mixedSortDF(), mixedSorts(), mixedSort(), mmixedOrder(), nameVectorN(), nameVector(), padInteger(), padString(), pasteByRowOrdered(), pasteByRow(), sizeAsNum(), tcount(), ucfirst(), uniques()