0

I am having problems with replacing parts of a single string with a set of vector replacements, to result in a vector.

I have a string tex which is intended to tell a diagram what text to put as the node (and other) labels.

So if tex is "!label has frequency of !frequency" and T has columns label with values c("chickens","ducks",...) and frequency with values c("chickens","ducks",...) amongst others, the function returns a vector like c("Chickens has frequency of 35","Ducks has frequency of 12",...)

More formally, the problem is:

Given a tibble T and a string tex, return a vector with length nrow(T), of which each element = tex but in which each occurrence within tex of the pattern !pattern is replaced by the vectorised contents of T$pattern

I looked at Replace string in R with patterns and replacements both vectors and String replacement with multiple string but they don't fit my usecase. stringr::str_replace() doesn't do it either.

Steve Powell
  • 1,646
  • 16
  • 26

1 Answers1

1

possible baseR-solution using sprintf()

animals = c("chickens","ducks") 
frequency = c(35,12)

sprintf( "%s has frequency of %s", animals, frequency)

[1] "chickens has frequency of 35" "ducks has frequency of 12"

also, 

tex = "%s has frequency of %s"
sprintf( tex, animals, frequency )

will gave the same results.

Wimpel
  • 26,031
  • 1
  • 20
  • 37