translate: Translate Vector or Matrix of Text Strings

Description

Uses the UNIX tr command to translate any character in old in text to the corresponding character in new. If multichar=T or old and new have more than one element, or each have one element but they have different numbers of characters, uses the UNIX sed command to translate the series of characters in old to the series in new when these characters occur in text. If old or new contain a backslash, you sometimes have to quadruple it to make the UNIX command work. If they contain a forward slash, preceed it by two backslashes. The Microsoft Windows version of translate invokes the sedit() function and does not allow multichar=FALSE, i.e., it does not support the UNIX tr function. The R version of translate invokes the builtin chartr function if multichar=FALSE.

Usage

translate(text, old, new, multichar=!under.unix)

Arguments

text

scalar, vector, or matrix of character strings to translate.

old

vector old characters

new

corresponding vector of new characters

multichar

See above.

Value

an object like text but with characters translated

Details

At present, multichar=FALSE, which requires the UNIX tr program, is not implemented under MS Windows.

Examples

Run this code

translate(c("ABC","DEF"),"ABCDEFG", "abcdefg")
translate("23.12","[.]","\\cdot ") # change . to \\cdot
translate(c("dog","cat","tiger"),c("dog","cat"),c("DOG","CAT"))
# S-Plus gives  [1] "DOG"   "CAT"   "tiger" - check discrepency
translate(c("dog","cat2","snake"),c("dog","cat"),"animal")
# S-Plus gives  [1] "animal"  "animal2" "snake"