Dear John, Gabor ... Thank you for your fast responses. In term of efficiency, does my code efficient? I mean, I thought there is a way to combine both patterns into a single line.
Also, I tried to substitute the pattern ([ <*]+) with ([[:punct:]]), as in R regex docs: patReg1 <- "(^[[:punct:]]+)" but it doesn't work. or, possibly it just my stupidity ? On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 5:59 PM, John Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Dear Ferry, > > You're almost all the way there. Just apply each substitution in turn: > > varReg <- "* < <* this is my text > > " > left <- "(^[ <*]+)" > right <- "([ > ]+$)" > sub(right, "", sub(left, "", varReg)) > [1] "this is my text" > > I hope this helps, > John > > ------------------------------ > John Fox, Professor > Department of Sociology > McMaster University > Hamilton, Ontario, Canada > web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox > > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > On >> Behalf Of Ferry >> Sent: November-03-08 8:38 PM >> To: r-help@r-project.org >> Subject: [R] regex question >> >> hello, >> >> i am trying to extract text using regex as follows: >> >> "* < <* this is my text > > " >> >> into: >> >> "this is my text" >> >> below what I did: >> >> varReg <- "* < <* this is my text > > " >> >> ## either this pattern >> patReg <- "(^[ <*]+)" >> ## or below patten >> patReg <- "([ > ]+$)" >> >> sub(patReg, '', varReg) >> >> depending of which patten I use, I could only extra the first portion >> or the last portion of the unwanted characters. how to extract both >> ends and keep my text "this is my text" ? >> >> I have tried with gsub, as below: >> patReg <- "([ >* ]+)" >> gsub(patReg, '', varReg) >> >> but it returned "thisismytext" >> >> any idea is appreciated. >> >> thanks, >> >> ferry >> >> ______________________________________________ >> 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. > > > ______________________________________________ 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.
