R Replace word in a string

Question

I have inherited an r project that has a dataframe with truncated text strings. Based on some responses in this forum, I have tried

temp$taname2 <- gsub("\bDistr\b", "District", temp$taname2)

This did not work. I tried

temp$taname2 <- gsub("Distr", "District", temp$taname2)

but this resulted in rows already containing the word "District" being changed to "Districtic", "Districtict", or similar. I also tried

temp$taname2[grep("\bDistr\b",temp$taname2)] <- "District"

but, alas, no luck.

I realise the answer is ridiculously simple but I haven't been able to work out how to do it.

Thanks in advance.

Does this answer your question? [Replace specific characters within strings](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11936339/replace-specific-characters-within-strings) — zx8754, Mar 29 '22 at 09:53

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

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You need to make use of regular expressions as well as the gsub function. I think this question is answered here: In R, replace text within a string

Hope this helps.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

Community

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answered Aug 06 '13 at 01:13

Kenty Ramdatt

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 07 '22 at 06:34

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gsub("\\s+Distr$|^Distr\\s+|\\s+Distr\\s+|^Distr$", " District ", 
     c("ends with Distr", "distr at start", "the word distr in the middle", "distr", "district"),  ignore.case = T)

edited Sep 07 '22 at 06:34

Suraj Rao

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answered Sep 07 '22 at 06:11

ronir

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 22 '15 at 07:51

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Use the stringi package:

require(stringi)

mydf<-data.frame(c("\bDistr\b", "\bDistr\b", "\bDistr\b", "\bDistr\b"))
stri_replace_all(mydf[,1], "", fixed="\b")
[1] "Distr" "Distr" "Distr" "Distr"

answered Nov 22 '15 at 07:51

MERose

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R Replace word in a string

3 Answers3