I am having some trouble learning regular expressions. Let me describe the general problem I am dealing with. Consider the following setup:
Joe<- c(1,2,3) Bob<- c(2,4,6) Alice <- c(9,8,7) Matrix <- cbind(Joe, Bob, Alice) St <- c("Bob", "Alice", "Alice:Bob") Now I want to make a new matrix having only the column's listed in St that were in Matrix (which I can do). However, In addition for elements of the form "Alice:Bob" I want to make a new column in my new matrix with the product of these columns. I am not sure if a semicolon is a valid symbol for a column name, if not we can replace it with something like qqq. I have been reading over various post on regular expressions, but really haven't made any progress. As far as I can tell there aren't standard string functions in R. (Also, as an aside, is there a wildcard character in R? I'd want something so if x="Bob" a statment of the form x== "B*b" would evaluate true where * is the wildcard.) Any help would be appreciated! (also, thanks again to those who helped on my last question!) ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.