Find keywords in a datatable in R

Question

I have a data table in R that has names numbers and emails

john smith 131234123412 email address
sally smith 2314423423 email address

They are separated by column

I want to be able to search for every instances where "john" is mentioned and then return the whole row.

@Michael - if one of the answers was correct and helpful, could you please accept it, so that it no longer appears as unanswered? — Jay Achar, Apr 14 '20 at 06:46

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 13 '20 at 17:08

It's really helpful for people wanting to help you to have a reproducible example - here's a link to explain how to do this easily: How to make a great R reproducible example

Without a reproducible example, it's a bit difficult to be exact with an answer, but here's something to nudge you in the right direction:

df[grepl("john", df$first_name), ]

I've named the data table df here and the column containing the name "john" as first_name.

'grepl' will search the first_name column for the word john. The data frame will then be filtered to contain any row where "john" is present.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 13 '20 at 17:13

0

Another option is str_detect with filter

library(stringr)
library(dplyr)
df %>%
    filter(str_detect(first_name, 'john'))

answered Apr 13 '20 at 17:13

akrun

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Find keywords in a datatable in R

2 Answers2