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stringr

Strings are not glamorous, high-profile components of R, but they do play a big role in many data cleaning and preparations tasks. R provides a solid set of string operations, but because they have grown organically over time, they can be inconsistent and a little hard to learn. Additionally, they lag behind the string operations in other programming languages, so that some things that are easy to do in languages like Ruby or Python are rather hard to do in R.

The stringr package aims to remedy these problems by providing a clean, modern interface to common string operations. More concretely, stringr:

  • Uses consistent functions and argument names.

  • Simplifies string operations by eliminating options that you don't need 95% of the time.

  • Produces outputs than can easily be used as inputs. This includes ensuring that missing inputs result in missing outputs, and zero length inputs result in zero length outputs.

  • Is built on top of stringi which uses the ICU library to provide fast, correct implementations of common string manipulations

Installation

To get the current released version from CRAN:

install.packages("stringr")

To get the current development version from github:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("Rexamine/stringi")
devtools::install_github("hadley/stringr")

Piping

stringr provides the pipe, %>%, from magrittr to make it easy to string together sequences of string operations:

letters %>%
  str_pad(5, "right") %>%
  str_c(letters)

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Version

Install

install.packages('stringr')

Monthly Downloads

918,555

Version

1.0.0

License

GPL-2

Maintainer

Hadley Wickham

Last Published

April 30th, 2015

Functions in stringr (1.0.0)

str_subset

Keep strings matching a pattern.
str_replace

Replace matched patterns in a string.
str_c

Join multiple strings into a single string.
str_length

The length of a string.
str_wrap

Wrap strings into nicely formatted paragraphs.
str_match

Extract matched groups from a string.
word

Extract words from a sentence.
str_dup

Duplicate and concatenate strings within a character vector.
str_pad

Pad a string.
stringr

Fast and friendly string manipulation.
str_order

Order or sort a character vector.
str_trim

Trim whitespace from start and end of string.
str_split

Split up a string into pieces.
modifier-deprecated

Deprecated modifier functions.
str_sub

Extract and replace substrings from a character vector.
modifiers

Control matching behaviour with modifier functions.
invert_match

Switch location of matches to location of non-matches.
str_count

Count the number of matches in a string.
case

Convert case of a string.
str_locate

Locate the position of patterns in a string.
%>%

Pipe operator
str_detect

Detect the presence or absence of a pattern in a string.
str_conv

Specify the encoding of a string.
str_extract

Extract matching patterns from a string.
str_replace_na

Turn NA into "NA"