保护特定单词,删除字符串中的字母

时间:2014-02-22 09:15:18

标签: regex string r

我想从字符串中删除字母,但保护特定字词。这是一个例子:

my.string <- "Water the 12 gold marigolds please, but not the 45 trees!"

desired.result <- "12 marigolds, 45 trees"

我尝试了下面的代码,结果令人惊讶。我以为()会保护它所包含的内容。相反,恰恰相反。仅删除了()中的字词(加上!)。

gsub("(marigolds|trees)\\D", "", my.string)

# [1] "Water the 12 gold please, but not the 45 "

以下是一个较长字符串的示例:

my.string <- "Water the 12 gold marigolds please, but not the 45 trees!, The 7 orange marigolds are fine."

desired.result <- "12 marigolds, 45 trees, 7 marigolds"

gsub("(marigolds|trees)\\D", "", my.string)

返回:

[1] "Water the 12 gold please, but not the 45 , The 7 orange are fine."

感谢您的任何建议。我更喜欢基础regex中的R解决方案。

2 个答案:

答案 0 :(得分:7)

使用字边界,负向前瞻断言。

> my.string <- "Water the 12 gold marigolds please, but not the 45 trees!"
> gsub("\\b(?!marigolds\\b|trees\\b)[A-Za-z]+\\s*", "", my.string, perl=TRUE)
[1] "12 marigolds , 45 trees!"
> gsub("\\b(?!marigolds\\b|trees\\b)[A-Za-z]+\\s*|!", "", my.string, perl=TRUE)
[1] "12 marigolds , 45 trees"

答案 1 :(得分:2)

捕获组的另一种方式:

my.string <- "Water the 12 gold marigolds please, but not the 45 trees!, The 7 orange marigolds are fine."
gsub("(?i)\\b(?:(marigolds|trees)|[a-z]+)\\b\\s*|[.?!]", "\\1", my.string, perl=TRUE)