[R] Extracting text from a character string

[Greg Snow]

Try replacing \d with \\d throughout your pattern.  The R parser is
trying to interpret the \ before the grep function ever sees it.  By
backslashing the backslashes, the parser ends up putting a single
backslash in the pattern for grep to see.

Hope this helps,

-- 
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
Statistical Data Center
Intermountain Healthcare
greg.snow at intermountainmail.org
(801) 408-8111
 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Shawn Way
> Sent: Friday, March 09, 2007 1:12 PM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R] Extracting text from a character string
> 
> I have a set of character strings like below:
>    
>   > data3[1]
> [1] "CB01_0171_03-27-2002-(Sample 26609)-(126)"
> > 
>    
>   I am trying to extract the text 03-27-2002 and convert this 
> into a date for the same record.  I keep looking at the grep 
> function, however I cannot quite get it to work.
>    
>   grep("\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\d\d",data3[1],perl=TRUE,value=TRUE)
>    
>   Any hints?
>    
>   Shawn Way
> 
>  
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