grep
Search for a Pattern in Text

Description

Searches for a text pattern as described by a regular expression in a vector of character strings.

Usage

grep(pattern, x, ignore.case = FALSE, perl = FALSE,
    value = FALSE, fixed = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE, invert = FALSE)
grepl(pattern, x, ignore.case = FALSE, perl = FALSE,
     fixed = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)
regexec(pattern, text, ignore.case = FALSE, perl = FALSE,
        fixed = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)

Arguments

pattern a character string specifying the pattern to search for. The interpretation of pattern is controlled by the values of the perl and fixed arguments. See regexpr for details.
x, text a vector of character strings in which to search.
ignore.case a logical value. If TRUE, uppercase and lowercase characters are considered equivalent when matching. The default is FALSE.
perl A logical value. If TRUE, the pattern is interpreted as a perl-compatible regular expression. If FALSE (the default), the pattern is interpreted as a POSIX extended regular expression.
value A logical value. If TRUE, grep returns the matched elements of x themselves. If FALSE (the default), grep returns the indices of the matched elements of x.
fixed A logical value. If TRUE, the pattern is treated as a literal sequence of characters. If FALSE (the default), the pattern is treated as a regular expression.
useBytes a logical value. If TRUE, then the x and pattern strings are treated as a simple sequence of bytes. If FALSE, and if any of the x or pattern strings have 'bytes' encoding (see Encoding), then useBytes is set to TRUE.
invert A logical value. If TRUE, returns items that do not match the pattern. If FALSE (the default), returns only items that match the patten.

Details

The pattern argument specifies a regular expression. See regexpr for details.
grep and grepl regard NA in the x argument as not matching any pattern. However, regexec returns NA for the match position and length in that case.
Value
grepif value=FALSE, returns a numeric vector indicating which elements of x matched pattern. (numeric(0) specifies no matches.) If value=TRUE, returns the matching elements of x. (If they are not character data, they are converted to character data.)
greplreturns a logical vector indicating which elements of x matched pattern. These return values can be used as a subscript to retrieve the matching elements of x.
regexecreturns a list of same length as given text; each element contains a sequence of integers representing the starting position of matches and all substrings corresponding to parenthesized subexpressions of pattern with the attribute "match.length". "match.length" is a vector of integers representing the length of matches. If there is no match, it returns -1.
Differences between Spotfire Enterprise Runtime for R and Open-source R
grep calls the regexpr function in Spotfire Enterprise Runtime for R implementation. However, both grep and grepl do not directly call the regexpr function in open-source R implementation. Internal C functions other than regexpr are called respectively.
Note
grep calls the regexpr function, which uses a pattern-matching language (resembling the Unix/Linux grep command) on all platforms and is done in C code (not as a call to any operating system command).
You can use the argument fixed=TRUE if the pattern does not represent a regular expression, but it is just a literal string to match. Alternatively, you can put a double backslash (\\) before the affected character to to cause it to be interpreted literally.
See Also
regexpr, agrep, charmatch, match, Encoding
Examples
grep("ia$", Sdatasets::state.name, value=TRUE)
  # returns all states that end in "ia"
grep("I", Sdatasets::state.name, value=TRUE, ignore.case=TRUE)
  # returns all states containing "I" or "i"
grep("^[AEIOUY].*[aeiouy]$", Sdatasets::state.name, value=TRUE)
  # returns states that begin and end with a vowel
grep("^[AEIOUY]|[aeiouy]$", Sdatasets::state.name, value=TRUE)
  # returns states that begin or end with a vowel
grep("^[AEIOUY]|[aeiouy]$", Sdatasets::state.name, value=TRUE, invert = TRUE)
 # returns states that do NOT begin or end with a vowel
grep("[aeiouy]{3,}", Sdatasets::state.name, value=TRUE)
  # names with 3 or more vowels in a row
grep("^([^aeiouy][aeiouy]+)*$", Sdatasets::state.name, ignore.case=TRUE,
    value=TRUE)
  # names where every consonant is followed by at least one vowel

numStrings <- c("+1","-10","+3","0")
numStrings[grep("^\\+", numStrings)]
numStrings[grepl("^\\+", numStrings)]
grep("^\\+", numStrings, value=TRUE)
  # 3 ways to get items starting with a plus sign

# using a backslash with grep:
str <- c("SP500","S.P500")
grep("^S.", str)  # S followed by any character
  # [1] 1 2
grep("^S\\.", str) # S followed by a period
  # [1] 2

# examples for regexec
x<-c("S500S500", "SP500")
# with parenthesized subexpressions in pattern
regexec("(^S+)([0-9])", x)
regexec("(^S+)([0-9].*)", x)
# no parenthesized subexpressions in pattern
regexec("^S+[0-9]", x)
Package base version 6.1.0-42
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