Steven Sanderson now has two problems:
Regular expressions, or regex, are incredibly powerful tools for pattern matching and extracting specific information from text data. Today, we’ll explore how to harness the might of regex in R with a practical example.
Let’s dive into a scenario where we have data that needs cleaning and extracting numerical values from strings. Our data, stored in a dataframe named
df, consists of four columns (x1,x2,x3,x4) with strings containing numerical values along with percentage values enclosed in parentheses. Our goal is to extract these numerical values and compute a total for each row.
Click through for a worked-out example.