How to Perform Partial String Matching in R (With Examples)

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Often you may want to find the rows in a data frame whose value in a certain column matches some partial string.

Fortunately we can use the function to do so, using the following syntax:

df[grep("string", df$column_name), ]

This tutorial provides several examples of how to use this function in practice on the following data frame:

#create data frame
df <- data.frame(player=c('A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G'),
                 position=c('S Guard', 'P Guard', 'P Guard', 'S Forward',
                            'P Forward', 'Center', 'Center'),
                 points=c(28, 17, 19, 14, 23, 26, 5))

#view data frame
df

  player   position  points
1      A    S Guard      28
2      B    P Guard      17
3      C    P Guard      19
4      D  S Forward      14
5      E  P Forward      23
6      F     Center      26
7      G     Center       5

Example 1: Find Partial Match in a Specific Column

The following code shows how to find all rows in the data frame that contain the string ‘Gua’ in the position column:

df[grep("Gua", df$position), ]

  player position points
1      A  S Guard     28
2      B  P Guard     17
3      C  P Guard     19

And the following code shows how to find all rows in the data frame that contain the string ‘P Gua’ in the position column:

df[grep("P Gua", df$position), ]

  player position points
2      B  P Guard     17
3      C  P Guard     19

Example 2: Find Several Partial Matches

The following code shows how to find all rows in the data frame that contain the string ‘S Gua’ or the string ‘Cen’ in the position column by using the | operator to indicate “or” in the grep argument:

df[grep("S Gua|Cen", df$position), ]

  player position points
1      A  S Guard     28
6      F   Center     26
7      G   Center      5

Note that we can use the | operator to search for as many partial strings as we’d like.

The following code shows how to use this operator to return the rows with partial strings ‘A’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘F’, or ‘G’ in the player column:

df[grep("A|C|D|F|G", df$player), ]

  player  position points
1      A   S Guard     28
3      C   P Guard     19
4      D S Forward     14
6      F    Center     26
7      G    Center      5

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