[R] regex find anything which is not a number

Adrian Dușa dusa.adrian at unibuc.ro
Wed Mar 11 20:27:10 CET 2015


Hi everyone,

I need a regular expression to find those positions in a character
vector which contain something which is not a number (either positive
or negative, having decimals or not).

myvector <- c("a3", "N.A", "1.2", "-3", "3-2", "2.")

In this vector, only positions 3 and 4 are numbers, the rest should be captured.
So far I am able to detect anything which is not a number, excluding - and .

> grep("[^-0-9.]", myvector)
[1] 1 2

I still need to capture positions 5 and 6, which in human language
would mean to detect anything which contains a "-" or a "." anywhere
else except at the beginning of a number.

Thanks very much in advance,
Adrian


-- 
Adrian Dusa
University of Bucharest
Romanian Social Data Archive
Soseaua Panduri nr.90
050663 Bucharest sector 5
Romania



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