Test if data frame has rowname beginning with certain characters?

Forgive the lack of REPREX, but I have a data frame, df

How do I ask if the data frame contains a rowname that has the first 3 letters "ABC"?

Thanks!

Here are three versions of detecting ABC at the beginning of the row names using grep functions from base R. The ^ before the ABC signifies the beginning of the string so that the first row name does not match.

DF <- data.frame(Value = 1:5, row.names = c("WABC", "TREWS", "ABCand", "UIO", "BDDSE"))
grep(pattern = "^ABC", row.names(DF))
#> [1] 3
grepl(pattern = "^ABC", row.names(DF))
#> [1] FALSE FALSE  TRUE FALSE FALSE
any(grepl(pattern = "^ABC", row.names(DF)))
#> [1] TRUE

Created on 2020-09-14 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)

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beautiful, thanks so much

Here's a cheat sheet for regular expressions in R that I find super helpful--I've been writing regex for years and still refer back to this all. the. time.

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Regular expressions are bewildering; there is only one rule that I remember by heart (for others there are cheatsheets): if you start with power (^), you end up with money ($) :slightly_smiling_face:

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