remove exact match word from a string

Question

I would like to remove the word "amp" in the below sentence.

original:

x <- 'come on ***amp*** this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket'

What I want:

x <- 'come on this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket'

However, if I used gsub, the "amp" in the word of "rampant" will be removed as well which is NOT the case I want. Can I know what function should I use in this case?

> gsub("amp","", x)
[1] "come on  this just encourages the already rant mispronunciation of phuket"

how about `gsub(" amp ", " ", x)`? – jbaums Apr 22 '14 at 06:29 — jbaums, Apr 22 '14 at 06:29

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 22 '14 at 06:33

1

You can use this regex:

gsub("\\bamp\\b","", x)
# [1] "come on  this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket"

The \\b means word boundary.

answered Apr 22 '14 at 06:33

Sven Hohenstein

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+1, however matching with `\b` like this might introduce problems in some cases. See the comments to this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5752829/regular-expression-for-exact-match-of-a-word/13065780#13065780. – Paul Hiemstra Apr 22 '14 at 06:36

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 22 '14 at 06:40

You could also split the string into words, and then compare:

x <- 'come on this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket'
split_into_words = strsplit(x, ' ')[[1]]
filtered_words = split_into_words[!split_into_words == 'amp']
paste(filtered_words, collapse = ' ')
[1] "come on this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket"

Rich Scriven · Answer 3 · 2014-04-22T07:05:00.633

0

You could just find the occurrence of "amp" that has a space in front.

> gsub("\\samp", "", x)
## [1] "come on this just encourages the already rampant mispronunciation of phuket"

where \\s means space. This is more readable as

> gsub(" amp", "", x)

edited Apr 22 '14 at 07:05

answered Apr 22 '14 at 06:42

Rich Scriven

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remove exact match word from a string

3 Answers3

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