kutils (version 1.34)

deduper: Removes redundant words from beginnings of character strings

Description

In Qualtrix data, we sometimes find repeated words in column names. This changes a vector c("Philadelphia_Philadelphia_3", "Denver_Denver_4") to c("Philadelphia_3", "Denver_4")

Usage

deduper(x, sep = ",_\\s-", n = NULL)

Arguments

x

Character vector

sep

Delimiter. A regular expression indicating the point at which to split the strings before checking for duplicates. Default will look for repeat separated by comma, underscore, or one space character.

n

Limit on number of duplicates to remove. Default, NULL, means delete all duplicates at the beginning of a string.

Value

Cleaned up vector.

Details

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43711240/r-regular-expression-match-omit-several-repeats

Examples

# NOT RUN {
x <- c("Philadelphia_Philadelphia_3", "Denver_Denver_4",
        "Den_Den_Den_Den_Den_Den_Den_5")
deduper(x)
deduper(x, n = 2)
deduper(x, n = 3)
deduper(x, n = 4)
x <- c("Philadelphia,Philadelphia_3", "Denver Denver_4")
## Shows comma also detected by default
deduper(x)
## Works even if delimiter is inside matched string,
## or separators vary
 x <- c("Den_5_Den_5_Den_5,Den_5 Den_5")
deduper(x)
## generate vector
x <- replicate(10, paste(sample(letters, 5), collapse = ""))
n <- c(paste0("_", sample(1:10, 5)), rep("", 5))
x <- paste0(x, "_", x, n, n)
x
deduper(x)

# }