I have been searching for a while now, but can't put all pieces of the puzzle together.
Goal : I want to replace all these kinds of patterns <@U032FHV3S> by this <@agreenmamba>. In a more generic way, it is replacing 'id' by user 'name'. I have two df: The first, 'history', is some message history where I want to do the replacement. It is a chat history log, The second one, idName, is a list of id:name. All are unique. This df rows are exctracted from a bigger one called 'users' this way : users[users$id %in% ext]. Please find below my two data.frames: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- history <- structure(list(name = c("xaeth", "agreenmamba", "poisonivy", "agreenmamba", "cruzecontrol", "poisonivy", "poisonivy", "vairis", "vairis", "poisonivy"), text = c("and people told that agent their geocities experience would never amount to anything (the convo yesterday) ", "<@U032FHV3S> <http://youtu.be/oGIFublvDes>", "for me there is no such question", "<@U03AEKWTL|agreenmamba> uploaded a file: <https://enlightened.slack.com/files/agreenmamba/F03KGRF3W/screenshot_2015-02-09-14-31-15.png|regarding: should I stay or should I go?>", "Lol.", "ha ha sorry", "some testing with my irc client", "anybody knows how does \"Passcode circuitry too hot. Wait for cool down to enter another passcode.\" works?", "what is the cooldown time or how does it work...;", "<@U03AEKYL4>: what app are you talking about ?" )), .Names = c("name", "text"), class = c("data.table", "data.frame" ), row.names = c(NA, -10L) -------------------------------------------------------------- idName <- structure(list(id = c("U03AEKWTL", "U032FHV3S", "U03AEKYL4"), name = c("agreenmamba", "poisonivy", "vairis")), .Names = c("id", "name"), sorted = "name", class = c("data.table", "data.frame" ), row.names = c(NA, -3L)) -------------------------------------------------------------------- 1- I can find the pattern to be replaced in history this way : ext <- regmatches(history$text,regexpr('(?<=<@)[^|]{9}(?=>|)',history$text, perl = T) > ext [1] "U032FHV3S" "U03AEKWTL" "U03AEKYL4" 2- I can select the pairs id:name in my 'users' df: > idName=users[users$id %in% ext] id name 1: U03AEKWTL agreenmamba 2: U032FHV3S poisonivy 3: U03AEKYL4 vairis 3- i can write a loop to make the changes: > hist.txt <- history$text > for (i in 1:3){hist.txt <- gsub(ext[i],idName[[2]][i], hist.txt, perl = T)} But this will not work because of two things: - 'idName' is not ordered the same way as 'ext' - if a users speak twice it will leave with with some NA May you have some hints how to process ? I was thinking of maybe using sapply(myFun) to my 'history' df where myFun would be the replacement process. OR something like with assigning in my env each 'id' to its corresponding 'name' Thank you for help ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.