Split two words connected by a dot

Question

I have a big dataframe with news articles. I have noticed that some of the articles have two words connected by a dot as the following examples shows The government.said it was important to quit.. I will conduct some topic modelling, so I need to separate every single word.

This is the code I have used to separate those words

    #String example
    test <- c("i need.to separate the words connected by dots. however, I need.to keep having the dots separating sentences")

    #Code to separate the words
    test <- do.call(paste, as.list(strsplit(test, "\\.")[[1]]))

   #This is what I get
  > test
  [1] "i need to separate the words connected by dots  however, I need to keep having the dots separating sentences"

As you can see, I deleted all the dots (periods) on the text. How could I get the following outcome:

"i need to separate the words connected by dots. however, I need to keep having the dots separating sentences"

Final note

My dataframe is composed of 17.000 articles; all the text is on lowercase. I just provided a small example of the issue I am having when trying to separate two words connected by a dot. Additionally, is there any way I can use strsplit on a list?

Try `gsub("\\b\\.\\b", " ", test, perl=TRUE)`. This will remove dots in between letters/digits/underscores. If it is not exactly what you need, could you explain in detail the context where you want to remove the dots? — Wiktor Stribiżew, Nov 19 '19 at 15:05
It works. Is there any chance I can apply this code without modifying urls? My dataframe consists of different news articles that have some urls within them. I would like to keep them but this code would definitely alter them. — Jose David, Nov 20 '19 at 11:15
I will post a new one as you have correctly answered this one for me. Thanks! — Jose David, Nov 20 '19 at 11:19

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 20 '19 at 11:22

You may use

test <- c("i need.to separate the words connected by dots. however, I need.to keep having the dots separating sentences. Look at http://google.com for s.0.m.e more details.")
# Replace each dot that is in between word characters
gsub("\\b\\.\\b", " ", test, perl=TRUE)
# Replace each dot that is in between letters
gsub("(?<=\\p{L})\\.(?=\\p{L})", " ", test, perl=TRUE)
# Replace each dot that is in between word characters, but no in URLs
gsub("(?:ht|f)tps?://\\S*(*SKIP)(*F)|\\b\\.\\b", " ", test, perl=TRUE)

See the R demo online.

Output:

[1] "i need to separate the words connected by dots. however, I need to keep having the dots separating sentences. Look at http://google com for s 0 m e more details."
[1] "i need to separate the words connected by dots. however, I need to keep having the dots separating sentences. Look at http://google com for s.0.m e more details."
[1] "i need to separate the words connected by dots. however, I need to keep having the dots separating sentences. Look at http://google.com for s 0 m e more details."

Details

\b\.\b - a dot that is enclosed with word boundaries (i.e. before and after . cannot be any non-word char, there cannot be any char other than a letter, digit or underscore
(?<=\p{L})\.(?=\p{L}) matches a dot that is not immediately preceded nor followed with a letter ((?<=\p{L}) is a negative lookbehind and the (?=\p{L}) is a negative lookahead)
(?:ht|f)tps?://\\S*(*SKIP)(*F)|\b\.\b matches http/ftp or https/ftps, then :// and then any 0 or more non-whitespace chars, and skips the match and goes on to search for matches from the position it was when it came across the SKIP PCRE verb.

Split two words connected by a dot

1 Answers1