Replace all strings matching a search criterion with another string in data.table

Question

I have data that looks like this:

                  sources
 1:           Jana’s iPhone
 2:     Richard's iPhone 6
 3:               Denise's
 4:           Sara’s iPhone
 5:     Jeff’s Apple Watch
 6:    BLAIR’s Apple Watch
 7:      Sunshine's iPhone
 8:         Brian's iPhone
 9: Jonathan’s Apple Watch
10: patricia’s Apple Watch

I'm trying to replace any string that contains iPhone just say iPhone. How can I do this?

I tried the following on a data table sources that contains a column also called sources:

sources[length(grep("iPhone", sources)) > 0, sources:= "iPhone"]

But this converts all rows to "iPhone" even if the row did not originally contain a string with "iPhone". I am guessing this is because grep or length is not vectorized, so I end up selecting all rows. So then my question becomes how can I identify the rows that contain a substring?

fishtank · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-03 18:49:11Z

5

Use grepl instead:

sources[grepl("iPhone", sources), sources:= "iPhone"]

answered Feb 3, 2016 at 18:49

fishtank

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1 Comment

Rich Scriven Over a year ago

And fixed = TRUE for efficiency

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