How to export marked text in R?

Question

Imagine you have text variable like:

x = as.character("If you do not 'answer' this question, 'two' persons will 'die' in the next second")

What is the best function to return only the quotation marked words such that

> FUNCTION(x)
> [1] "answer" "two"    "die"

Possible duplicate of [Extracting a string between other two strings in R](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39086400/extracting-a-string-between-other-two-strings-in-r) — ekstroem, Jul 26 '17 at 22:58

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 26 '17 at 22:48

You can use the stringr package...

library(stringr)
y <- str_match_all(x,"\\'([^\\s]+)\\'")[[1]][,2]

y
[1] "answer" "two"    "die"

If you are applying it to a vector x, str_match_all will produce a list with a 2-column matrix for each element of x. You need the second column of each.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 01 '19 at 01:05

Here's another way using base package:

x = "If you do not 'answer' this question, 'two' persons will 'die' in the next second"

gsub( "'",
      "",
      grep(
        pattern = "'[a-z]+'",
        x = strsplit(x, " ")[[1]],
        value   = T 
        )
     )

# [1] "answer" "two"    "die"

How to export marked text in R?

2 Answers2