Parsing strings into data frames

Question

I have a bunch of strings which look like this:

 [3] "  3. Wiki: Los Angeles 3:58pm; score:1.959502"        
 [4] "  4. Wiki: Boston 6:58pm; score:1.959502"             
 [5] "  5. Disambiguation: 'Boon; score:1.934644"            
 [6] "  6. Wiki: The Note (album)\"; score:1.786931"

I parse them into a data frame like this:

read.csv(text=sub("^  [0-9]*\\. (Wiki|Disambiguation): (.*); score:([0-9\\.]*)$","\"\\2\",\\3",ll),
         header=FALSE,stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

the trouble is that the \\2 text which I enclose in quotes may contains quotes (double and single) itself.

How do I deal with this?

does changing the double to single in ,"\"\\2\", to ,"\'\\2\' help? the sub still works sub("^ [0-9]*\\. (Wiki|Disambiguation): (.*); score:([0-9\\.]*)$","\'\'\'''2''\',\\3", 'hello') — rawr
– rawr, Commented Feb 14, 2014 at 2:53

G. Grothendieck · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-14 00:32:52Z

1

Just remove the double quotes:

ll <-  gsub('"', '', ll)

NOTE: Changed answer after poster gave an example of how it goes wrong.

edited Feb 14, 2014 at 0:32

answered Feb 14, 2014 at 0:14

G. Grothendieck

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1 Comment

sds Over a year ago

I added quotes to the places where they cause me grief

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