I have a set of strings and I need to search by words that have a period in the middle. Some of the strings are concatenated so I need to break them apart in to words so that I can then filter for words with dots.
Below is a sample of what I have and what I get so far
punctToRemove <- c("[^[:alnum:][:space:]._]")
s <- c("get_degree('TITLE',PERS.ID)",
"CLIENT_NEED.TYPE_CODe=21",
"2.1.1Report Field Level Definition",
"The user defined field. The user will validate")
This is what I currently get
gsub(punctToRemove, " ", s)
[1] "get_degree TITLE PERS.ID "
[2] "CLIENT_NEED.TYPE_CODe 21"
[3] "2.1.1Report Field Level Definition"
[4] "The user defined field. The user will validate"
Sample of what I want is below
[1] "get_degree ( ' TITLE ' , PERS.ID ) " # spaces before and after the "(", "'", ",",and ")"
[2] "CLIENT_NEED.TYPE_CODe = 21" # spaces before and after the "=" sign. Dot and underscore remain untouched.
[3] "2.1.1Report Field Level Definition" # no changes
[4] "The user defined field. The user will validate" # no changes
We can use regex lookarounds
s1 <- gsub("(?<=['=(),])|(?=['(),=])", " ", s, perl = TRUE)
s1
#[1] "get_degree ( ' TITLE ' , PERS.ID ) "
#[2] "CLIENT_NEED.TYPE_CODe = 21"
#[3] "2.1.1Report Field Level Definition"
#[4] "The user defined field. The user will validate"
nchar(s1)
#[1] 35 26 34 46
which is equal to the number of characters showed in the OP's expected output.