Character Translation and Case Folding

Description

Translate characters in character vectors, in particular from upper to lower case or vice versa.

Usage

chartr(old, new, x)
tolower(x)
toupper(x)
casefold(x, upper = FALSE)

Arguments

Details

chartr translates each character in x that is specified in old to the corresponding character specified in new. Ranges are supported in the specifications, but character classes and repeated characters are not. If old contains more characters than new, an error is signaled; if it contains fewer characters, the extra characters at the end of new are ignored. To include a literal - that should not denote a range, make it the first or the last character in the specification.

tolower and toupper convert upper-case characters in a character vector to lower-case, or vice versa. Non-alphabetic characters are left unchanged. More than one character can be mapped to a single upper-case character.

casefold is a wrapper for tolower and toupper originally written for compatibility with S-PLUS.

Value

A character vector of the same length and with the same attributes as x (after possible coercion).

Elements of the result will be have the encoding declared as that of the current locale (see Encoding) if the corresponding input had a declared encoding and the current locale is either Latin-1 or UTF-8. The result will be in the current locale's encoding unless the corresponding input was in UTF-8 or Latin-1, when it will be in UTF-8.

Note

These functions are platform-dependent, usually using OS services. The latter can be quite deficient, for example only covering ASCII characters in 8-bit locales. The definition of ‘alphabetic’ is platform-dependent and liable to change over time as most platforms are based on the frequently-updated Unicode tables.

See Also

sub and gsub for other substitutions in strings.

Examples

x <- "MiXeD cAsE 123"
chartr("iXs", "why", x)
chartr("a-cX", "D-Fw", x)
tolower(x)
toupper(x)

## "Mixed Case" Capitalizing - toupper( every first letter of a word ) :

.simpleCap <- function(x) {
    s <- strsplit(x, " ")[[1]]
    paste(toupper(substring(s, 1, 1)), substring(s, 2),
          sep = "", collapse = " ")
}
.simpleCap("the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog")
## ->  [1] "The Quick Red Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Brown Dog"

## and the better, more sophisticated version:
capwords <- function(s, strict = FALSE) {
    cap <- function(s) paste(toupper(substring(s, 1, 1)),
                  {s <- substring(s, 2); if(strict) tolower(s) else s},
                             sep = "", collapse = " " )
    sapply(strsplit(s, split = " "), cap, USE.NAMES = !is.null(names(s)))
}
capwords(c("using AIC for model selection"))
## ->  [1] "Using AIC For Model Selection"
capwords(c("using AIC", "for MODEL selection"), strict = TRUE)
## ->  [1] "Using Aic"  "For Model Selection"
##                ^^^        ^^^^^
##               'bad'       'good'

## -- Very simple insecure crypto --
rot <- function(ch, k = 13) {
   p0 <- function(...) paste(c(...), collapse = "")
   A <- c(letters, LETTERS, " '")
   I <- seq_len(k); chartr(p0(A), p0(c(A[-I], A[I])), ch)
}

pw <- "my secret pass phrase"
(crypw <- rot(pw, 13)) #-> you can send this off

## now ``decrypt'' :
rot(crypw, 54 - 13) # -> the original:
stopifnot(identical(pw, rot(crypw, 54 - 13)))