Regex group capture in R with multiple capture-groups

Question

In R, is it possible to extract group capture from a regular expression match? As far as I can tell, none of grep, grepl, regexpr, gregexpr, sub, or gsub return the group captures.

I need to extract key-value pairs from strings that are encoded thus:

\((.*?) :: (0\.[0-9]+)\)

I can always just do multiple full-match greps, or do some outside (non-R) processing, but I was hoping I can do it all within R. Is there's a function or a package that provides such a function to do this?

Answer 1

str_match(), from the stringr package, will do this. It returns a character matrix with one column for each group in the match (and one for the whole match):

> s = c("(sometext :: 0.1231313213)", "(moretext :: 0.111222)")
> str_match(s, "\\((.*?) :: (0\\.[0-9]+)\\)")
     [,1]                         [,2]       [,3]          
[1,] "(sometext :: 0.1231313213)" "sometext" "0.1231313213"
[2,] "(moretext :: 0.111222)"     "moretext" "0.111222"    

Answer 2

gsub does this, from your example:

gsub("\\((.*?) :: (0\\.[0-9]+)\\)","\\1 \\2", "(sometext :: 0.1231313213)")
[1] "sometext 0.1231313213"

you need to double escape the \s in the quotes then they work for the regex.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Try regmatches() and regexec():

regmatches("(sometext :: 0.1231313213)",regexec("\\((.*?) :: (0\\.[0-9]+)\\)","(sometext :: 0.1231313213)"))
[[1]]
[1] "(sometext :: 0.1231313213)" "sometext"                   "0.1231313213"

Answer 4

gsub() can do this and return only the capture group:

However, in order for this to work, you must explicitly select elements outside your capture group as mentioned in the gsub() help.

(...) elements of character vectors 'x' which are not substituted will be returned unchanged.

So if your text to be selected lies in the middle of some string, adding .* before and after the capture group should allow you to only return it.

gsub(".*\\((.*?) :: (0\\.[0-9]+)\\).*","\\1 \\2", "(sometext :: 0.1231313213)") [1] "sometext 0.1231313213"

Answer 5

I like perl compatible regular expressions. Probably someone else does too...

Here is a function that does perl compatible regular expressions and matches the functionality of functions in other languages that I am used to:

regexpr_perl <- function(expr, str) {
  match <- regexpr(expr, str, perl=T)
  matches <- character(0)
  if (attr(match, 'match.length') >= 0) {
    capture_start <- attr(match, 'capture.start')
    capture_length <- attr(match, 'capture.length')
    total_matches <- 1 + length(capture_start)
    matches <- character(total_matches)
    matches[1] <- substr(str, match, match + attr(match, 'match.length') - 1)
    if (length(capture_start) > 1) {
      for (i in 1:length(capture_start)) {
        matches[i + 1] <- substr(str, capture_start[[i]], capture_start[[i]] + capture_length[[i]] - 1)
      }
    }
  }
  matches
}

Answer 6

This is how I ended up working around this problem. I used two separate regexes to match the first and second capture groups and run two gregexpr calls, then pull out the matched substrings:

regex.string <- "(?<=\\().*?(?= :: )"
regex.number <- "(?<= :: )\\d\\.\\d+"

match.string <- gregexpr(regex.string, str, perl=T)[[1]]
match.number <- gregexpr(regex.number, str, perl=T)[[1]]

strings <- mapply(function (start, len) substr(str, start, start+len-1),
                  match.string,
                  attr(match.string, "match.length"))
numbers <- mapply(function (start, len) as.numeric(substr(str, start, start+len-1)),
                  match.number,
                  attr(match.number, "match.length"))

Answer 7

Solution with strcapture from the utils:

x <- c("key1 :: 0.01",
       "key2 :: 0.02")
strcapture(pattern = "(.*) :: (0\\.[0-9]+)",
           x = x,
           proto = list(key = character(), value = double()))
#>    key value
#> 1 key1  0.01
#> 2 key2  0.02

Answer 8

As suggested in the stringr package, this can be achieved using either str_match() or str_extract().

Adapted from the manual:

library(stringr)

strings <- c(" 219 733 8965", "329-293-8753 ", "banana", 
             "239 923 8115 and 842 566 4692",
             "Work: 579-499-7527", "$1000",
             "Home: 543.355.3679")
phone <- "([2-9][0-9]{2})[- .]([0-9]{3})[- .]([0-9]{4})"

Extracting and combining our groups:

str_extract_all(strings, phone, simplify=T)
#      [,1]           [,2]          
# [1,] "219 733 8965" ""            
# [2,] "329-293-8753" ""            
# [3,] ""             ""            
# [4,] "239 923 8115" "842 566 4692"
# [5,] "579-499-7527" ""            
# [6,] ""             ""            
# [7,] "543.355.3679" ""   

Indicating groups with an output matrix (we're interested in columns 2+):

str_match_all(strings, phone)
# [[1]]
#      [,1]           [,2]  [,3]  [,4]  
# [1,] "219 733 8965" "219" "733" "8965"
# 
# [[2]]
#      [,1]           [,2]  [,3]  [,4]  
# [1,] "329-293-8753" "329" "293" "8753"
# 
# [[3]]
#      [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
# 
# [[4]]
#      [,1]           [,2]  [,3]  [,4]  
# [1,] "239 923 8115" "239" "923" "8115"
# [2,] "842 566 4692" "842" "566" "4692"
# 
# [[5]]
#      [,1]           [,2]  [,3]  [,4]  
# [1,] "579-499-7527" "579" "499" "7527"
# 
# [[6]]
#      [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
# 
# [[7]]
#      [,1]           [,2]  [,3]  [,4]  
# [1,] "543.355.3679" "543" "355" "3679"