Find values starting with a specific word

[Nice]

Hello everyone,

My question might seem easy, but I have tried several things but still nothing works….!

I have a column, lets say called "a", that contains several thousands of "words".

What I want to do is to choose only those rows, where the value of "a" STARTS WITH "AC01".

I have tried the filter-function, but the problem is that it returns all rows CONTAINING "AC01", which sometimes is inside the word, but I only want the word when it starts with "AC01"
Anybody have any idea?

Best regards….

[ulfelder]

You need to use a regular expression that checks whether the substring of interest is at the start of the string. So, for example...

library(dplyr)
 
df <- data.frame(a = c("AC01Waq7", "AC2-wiggle", "AC01hithere"),
                 stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

print(df)

            a
1    AC01Waq7
2  AC2-wiggle
3 AC01hithere
 
filter(df, grepl("^AC01*", a))
            a
1    AC01Waq7
2 AC01hithere

Or, if you want to stay in the tidyverse...

library(stringr)

filter(df, str_detect(a, "^AC01*"))

[Nice]

Thank you very much @ulfelder !
Although it seems my results become more correct if I dont type the Asterix (*) in the end

My Best Regards!

[Nice]

Then another question, please.... what if I want to change all the values that start with "A01" to fx "BB"?

[ulfelder]

@Nice, do you mean change the whole string to "BB", or just replace the "A01" with "BB"?

[Nice]

@ulfelder
I mean change the WHOLE string that starts with "A01" to "BB" . I am considering "ifelse"....but there might be better options...?

[ulfelder]

@Nice, I don't see anything wrong with using ifelse. Something like...

mutate(df, a2 = ifelse(str_detect(a, "^AC01"), "BB", a)) 

Or, in base R...

df$a2 <- with(df, ifelse(grepl("^AC01", a), "BB", a))