How to write a simple regular expression in R using sub and str_replace (CC183)
Channel: Riffomonas Project
Date: 2022-01-31

A regular expression is a pattern that you want to search for and do something with. R has a variety of tools for creating regular expressions that allow you to maniuplate text. In this episode we'll see the similarities and differences between sub and str_replace and how they differ from gsub and str_replace_all. We'll introduce metacharacters and quantifiers. This is part of a series of videos demonstrating how to functions from base R to make these data compatible with tools from the tidyverse

You can find my blog post for this episode at https://www.riffomonas.org/code_club/2022-01-31-basic-regex.

The data were generated in our Kozich et al. 2013 paper (http://doi.org/10.1128/AEM.01043-13) using samples from the Schloss et al. 2012 paper (http://doi.org/10.4161/gmic.21008).

#sub #str_replace #R #Rstudio #Rstats

Want more practice on the concepts covered in Code Club? You can sign up for my weekly newsletter at https://shop.riffomonas.org/youtube to get practice problems, tips, and insights.

If you're interested in taking an upcoming 3 day R workshop be sure to check out our schedule at https://riffomonas.org/workshops/

You can also find complete tutorials for learning R with the tidyverse using...
Microbial ecology data: https://www.riffomonas.org/minimalR/
General data: https://www.riffomonas.org/generalR/

0:00 Basics of regular expressions in R
3:28 Using the stringr cheat sheet
4:43 Using sub and str_replace to match specific characters and strings
7:38 The difference between sub/gsub and str_replace/str_replace_all
10:09 Using metacharacters to generalize a pattern
12:31 Using the * quantifier in a pattern
14:55 Creating three new columns from samples