[R] Regular Expressions

Noah Silverman noah at smartmediacorp.com
Fri Nov 5 07:55:09 CET 2010


Hi,

I'm trying to figure out how to use capturing parenthesis in regular 
expressions in R.  (Doing this in Perl, Java, etc. is fairly trivial, 
but I can't seem to find the functionality in R.)

For example, given the string:    "10 Nov 13.00 (PFE1020K13)"

I want to capture the first to digits and then the month abreviation.

In perl, this would be

/^(\d\d)\s(\w\w\w)\s/

Then I have the variables $1 and $1 assigned to the capturing parenthesis.

I've found the grep and sub commands in R, but the docs don't indicate 
any way to capture things.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

-N



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