[R] excluding on element from a list

Daisy Englert Duursma daisy.duursma at gmail.com
Tue May 25 01:46:24 CEST 2010


Thanks for your help and for the info on the website. I did not know
what to call regular expressions and so I could not search for them.
Cheers!
d

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 7:08 PM,  <Richard.Cotton at hsl.gov.uk> wrote:
>> I am making a list of all the files in a folder and I want to exclude
>> one file called "proj.current".  This is the 31st file in a folder.
>> Currently I use the command:
>>
>> tdirs <- list.files(pattern="proj.")[-31]
>>
>> However I would like to exclude it based on its name and not the
> position.
>
> You need to update the pattern in the regular expression to look for
> strings beginning with "proj.", but not having "current" afterwards.
>
> My first thought was to use perl style regular expressions, but apprently
> this isn't supported.
> tdirs <- list.files(pattern = "proj\\.(?!current)", perl=TRUE)   #Throws
> error
>
> Instead, you're probably better off doing it in two steps.
> tdirs <- list.files(pattern="proj\\.")
> tdirs <- tdirs[tdirs != "proj.current"]
>
> Notice the difference between "proj." and "proj\\.".  The first means
> 'proj followed by any character', and the second means 'proj followed by a
> dot'.  See http://www.regular-expressions.info/quickstart.html for more
> info on regexes.
>
> Regards,
> Richie.
>
> Mathematical Sciences Unit
> HSL
>
>
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-- 
Daisy Englert Duursma

Room E8C156
Dept. Biological Sciences
Macquarie University  NSW  2109
Australia

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