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rstringtextcharacterstringr

Changing isolated words in R?

In R, I have a character vector like:

vector<-c("BAKING CO", "NEW COBALT", "CO INC")

I would like to convert the word "CO" to "COMPANY", but only when "CO" appears as a word by itself. I do not want to change the word "cobalt." My desired output is:

vector<-c("BAKING COMPANY", "NEW COBALT", "COMPANY INC")

Is there a way to do this in R?

Solution

  • Use word boundaries:

    library(stringr)

str_replace_all(vector, "\\bCO\\b", "COMPANY")

    In base R:

    gsub("\\bCO\\b", "COMPANY", vector)

    Note, if you have multiple abbreviations you want to change str_replace_all() can take a named vector for replacement:

    vector <- c("BAKING CO", "NEW COBALT", "CO INC")
change <- c("CO" = "COMPANY", "INC" = "INCORPORATED")

    library(stringr)

names(change) <- str_c("\\b", names(change), "\\b")
str_replace_all(vector, change)