[R] agrep pmatch recursive???

[Broeckling,Corey]

 Hello R Helpers,

Business - 64 bit windows 7, R 2.11.1



I am trying to match the character contents of one list, called 'exclude', to those of a second list, called 'dataset'

dataset is a list of file names with folder locations, and looks like this when called:

> dataset
 [1] "A/10-10-29a-13.cdf" "A/10-10-29a-14.cdf" "A/10-10-29a-15.cdf" "A/10-10-29a-16.cdf" "A/10-10-29a-17.cdf" .....(about 20

file location/names in this case).....

I also have the 'exclude' list, which looks like this when called:

> exclude
     Row.names
1 10-10-29a-13
2 10-10-29a-14
3 10-10-29a-17
4 10-10-29a-18

or

> exclude[,]
[1] "10-10-29a-13" "10-10-29a-14" "10-10-29a-17" "10-10-29a-18"

As you can see, the formats of the file names in the exclude list are different from those in the dataset list.  What I want to

do is to match file names in the exclude list to those in the dataset list and remove them to create a subset_dataset, composed

of all the dataset files minus the files in the exclude list.  Since the file names are different, it seems that i have to use

a function such as agrep, and have gotten this to work if I feed in individual file names:

> agrep("10-10-29a-13", dataset, value=TRUE, max.distance=0)
[1] "B/10-10-29a-13.cdf"

However, I don't want to do this manually for each file on the exclude list - I want to do so for each character string on the

exclude list.  I am not aware of any list options in agrep specifically, and while pmatch takes a list of a match option, it

will not successfully match the partial string:

> pmatch(exclude[,], dataset)
[1] NA NA NA NA

I am still in the process of teaching myself R, so maybe there is something I am missing.  I also tried to figure out how to

use the recursive apply functionality, but haven't been able to get that to work.  Any suggestions?

Corey