Removing dots in acronyms

Question

I have a vector with acronyms like "U.S."

I want to remove the dots between the characters, but I do not want to remove all dots in the whole document, so just those in acronyms.

I can do this by using gsub:

text <- c("U.S.", "U.N.", "C.I.A")
gsub("U.S.", "US", text)

But how can I tell R to remove all points in all possible acronyms (i.e., also in "U.N." Or "C.I.A.")?

https://regex101.com/r/nQ3jI8/1 ? – Avinash Raj Apr 29 '16 at 09:21 — Avinash Raj, Apr 29 '16 at 09:21

Chirayu Chamoli · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-29T09:34:17.597

1

You can word boundary here

gsub('\\b\\.','',vec)

or simpler option is stated in the comments!

edited Apr 29 '16 at 09:34

answered Apr 29 '16 at 09:22

Chirayu Chamoli

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You can do further processing of the string. – Chirayu Chamoli Apr 29 '16 at 09:23
I can remove the last dots with a final gsub expression! so that solution works, thank you! – feder80 Apr 29 '16 at 10:29

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:59

Your question seems a bit different from the code you provide: you want to replace acronyms in text that presumably contains dots that aren't acronyms/abbreviations.

This code extracts and identifies acronyms by searching for repeated capital-dot combinations (which can be manually checked and filtered mid-workflow to make sure it's not picking up anything odd), then replaces them using the mgsub code from Replace multiple arguments with gsub

text1 <- c("The U.S. and the C.I.A. are acronyms. They should be matched.")
m <- gregexpr("([A-Z]\\.)+", text1)
matches <- regmatches(text1, m)[[1]]
matches_nodot <- sapply(matches, gsub, pattern = "\\.", replacement = "")

mgsub <- function(pattern, replacement, x, ...) {
  if (length(pattern)!=length(replacement)) {
    stop("pattern and replacement do not have the same length.")
  }
  result <- x
  for (i in 1:length(pattern)) {
    result <- gsub(pattern[i], replacement[i], result, ...)
  }
  result
}


text2 <- mgsub(matches, matches_nodot, text1)
text2
# [1] "The US and the CIA are acronyms. They should be matched."

Removing dots in acronyms

2 Answers2