[R] Parsing regular expressions differently - feature request

[Wacek Kusnierczyk]

Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 08/11/2008 11:03 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 9:41 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
>> wrote:
>>> On 08/11/2008 7:20 AM, John Wiedenhoeft wrote:
>>>> Hi there,
>>>>
>>>> I rejoiced when I realized that you can use Perl regex from within R.
>>>> However, as the FAQ states "Some functions, particularly those
>>>> involving
>>>> regular expression matching, themselves use metacharacters, which
>>>> may need
>>>> to be escaped by the backslash mechanism. In those cases you may
>>>> need a
>>>> quadruple backslash to represent a single literal one. "
>>>>
>>>> I was wondering if that is really necessary for perl=TRUE? wouldn't
>>>> it be
>>>> possible to parse a string differently in a regex context, e.g.
>>>> automatically insert \\ for each \ , such that you can use the perl
>>>> syntax
>>>> directly? For example, if you want to input a newline as a
>>>> character, you
>>>> would use \n anyway. At the moment one says \\n to make it clear to
>>>> R that
>>>> you mean \n to make clear that you mean newline... this is pretty
>>>> annoying.
>>>> How likely is it that you want to pass a real newline character to
>>>> PCRE
>>>> directly?
>>> No, that's not possible.  At the level where the parsing takes place
>>> R has
>>> no idea of its eventual use, so it can't tell that some strings are
>>> going to
>>> be interpreted as Perl, and others not.
Here's a quick hack to achieve the impossible:

mygrep = function(pattern, text, perl=FALSE, ...) {
   if (perl) pattern = gsub("\\\\", "\\\\\\\\", pattern)
   grep(pattern, text, perl=perl, ...)
}

(text = "lemme \\ it")
# [1] "lemme \\ it"

nchar(text)
# [1] 10

(pattern = "\\")
# [1] "\\"
nchar(pattern)
# [1] 1

grep(pattern, text, perl=TRUE)
# can't go, impossible!

mygrep(pattern, text, perl=TRUE, value=TRUE)
# [1] "lemme \\ it"

vQ