Splitting a string based on a vector of strings in R

Question

I have the following string and vector:

temp = "EarthMars Venus & Saturn PlanetsJupiter"

searchTerms = c("Earth", "Jupiter", "Mars", "Venus & Saturn Planets", "Neptune")

I want to split 'temp' based on the strings in 'searchTerms', so that I get the following:

result = c("Earth", "Mars", "Venus & Saturn Planets", "Jupiter")

Thanks for the help!

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 09 '17 at 19:18

2

Using the stringr package, you could do:

library(stringr)
result = unlist(str_extract_all(temp,searchTerms))

[1] "Earth"          "Jupiter"         "Mars"           "Venus & Saturn Planets"

answered Jun 09 '17 at 19:18

Lamia

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 09 '17 at 19:18

One option similar to this post (R split on delimiter (split) keep the delimiter (split)) is:

searchStr <- paste0(searchTerms, collapse = "|")
unlist(strsplit(temp, paste0("(?<=",searchStr,")"), perl = T))

[1] "Earth" "Mars"  " Venus & Saturn Planets" "Jupiter"

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 09 '17 at 19:28

1

Another one-liner option with only base functions:

result <- unlist(lapply(searchTerms, function(x) regmatches(temp,regexpr(x,temp))))

answered Jun 09 '17 at 19:28

Val

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Splitting a string based on a vector of strings in R

3 Answers3