[R] regex -> negate a word

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Note that the variation of this that I posted already handles that case.

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Wacek Kusnierczyk
> <Waclaw.Marcin.Kusnierczyk at idi.ntnu.no> wrote:
>>> x <- c("abcdef", "defabc", "qwerty")
>>> ...[find] all elements where the word 'abc' does not appear (i.e. 3 in this case of 'x').
>
>> x[-grep("abc", x)]
>> which unfortunately fails if none of the strings in x matches the pattern, i.e., grep returns integer(0);
>
> Yes.
>
>> arguably, x[integer(0)] should rather return all elements of x
>
> The meaning of x[V] (for an integer subscript vector V) is: ignore 0
> entries, and then:
>
> a) if !(all(V>0) | all(V<0) ) => ERROR
> b) if all (V>0): length(x[V]) == length(V)
> c) if all (V<0): length(x[V]) == length(x)-length(unique(V))
>
> When length(V)==0, the preconditions are true for both (b) and (c), so
> the R design has made the decision that length(x[V]) == 0 in this
> case.  If you're going to have the "negative indices means exclusion"
> trick, this seems like a reasonable convention.
>
> Of course, that means that you can't in general use x[-V] (where
> all(V>0)) to mean "all elements that are not in V".  However, there is
> a workaround if you have an upper bound on length(x):
>
>       x[ c(-2^30, -V) ]
>
> This guarantees at least one negative number.
>
>           -s
>
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