Search code examples
rdummy-variable

create dummy variable from string variable

I am trying to create a dummy variable from a column variable from an existing data set. The variable I am interested in is a title in this format:

CHEMICALS - Commission Delegated Directive (EU) 2015/863 of 31 March 2015 amending Annex II to Directive 2011/65/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards the list of restricted substances (Text with EEA relevance)

or

Commission Implementing Directive (EU) 2015/2392...

I want to create a dummy variable indicating that the Title is either implementing or delegated. In other words, when the word "delegated" is in my title variable, this will be labeled 1 and everything else will be labeled 0.

Can anyone help me with this? It is very appreciated. So far, I have used this code: 

infringements$delegated <- ifelse(infringements$Title=="Delegated", 1, 0)
table(infringements$delegated, infringements$Title)  
summary(infringements$delegated)

When I run the code, I get 0 matches, even though I know that there are 41 matches.

Solution

  • Use str_detect() from the package stringr

    library(stringr)

as.integer(str_detect(infringements$Title,"Delegated"))