Replace Strings in R with regular expression in it dynamically

Asked Feb 24 '20 at 15:43

Active Feb 24 '20 at 15:43

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I have strings I have to replace, a ton of them exactly.

They have regular expressions in it:

to_replace <- c("Prop. D. Absatz Pack (w)", "Preis pro konv. Einh.", "Promopreis pro konv. Einh.")
replacing <- c("prop", "preis", "promo")

x <- c("Prop. D. Absatz Pack (w)", "test", "Promopreis pro konv. Einh.")

for (i in seq_along(to_replace)) {
    gsub(pattern = paste0("\\b", to_replace[i] , "\\b"), paste0("\\b", replacing[i], "\\b"), x)
}

It does not work unfortunately. Is there a way to use ALL of these . or ( as normal characters, not as regular expression? Thank you!

asked Feb 24 '20 at 15:43

Data Mastery

1

What you ask is a regex escaping function. This is a solved issue, but there may be another problem here with `\b` word boundaries. Use `(? – Wiktor Stribiżew Feb 24 '20 at 15:48
thank you for that link, that quotemeta function did the job :-) – Data Mastery Feb 24 '20 at 15:54

Replace Strings in R with regular expression in it dynamically

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