Using strsplit with multiple separators

Question

A character string of interest can either be 'there are five apples' or 'there are five APPLES'

  strsplit(string, c('apples', 'APPLES'))

So I want to split by either apples or APPLES because I don't know if the string is going to have lower case or uppercase letters. But I tried the code above and it didn't work.

Sorry, bad example. Let me edit. Okay I think this example is a bit better. — Adrian, Nov 07 '14 at 04:11
Do you want the search to find the word if lower case or upper case? i.e. the character combination rather than case dependent? — Docconcoct, Nov 07 '14 at 04:17
Yes, that's right. Find the word apple (case insensitive) in the string and then split the string — Adrian, Nov 07 '14 at 04:18
Well, that is going to affect the rest of my function. So I can't just convert my string to lowercase — Adrian, Nov 07 '14 at 04:19
While not strsplit this may be an approach to solving your question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5671719/case-insensitive-search-of-a-list-in-r — Docconcoct, Nov 07 '14 at 04:26

hwnd · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-07T04:27:40.883

2

You could use the following which splits on case-insensitive "apples".

x <- 'there are five APPLES in this case'
unlist(strsplit(x, '(?i:apples)', perl=T))
# [1] "there are five " " in this case"

edited Nov 07 '14 at 04:27

answered Nov 07 '14 at 04:21

hwnd

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That is interesting, can you explain a bit what just happened here? – David Arenburg Nov 07 '14 at 07:02
@DavidArenburg The inline `i` (case-insensitive) modifier is placed inside of a non-capturing group. http://regex101.com/r/nL0jN5/1 – hwnd Nov 07 '14 at 13:56

Using strsplit with multiple separators

1 Answers1