Solution
It is possible to use str_detect of the stringr package included in the tidyverse package. str_detect returns True or False as to whether the specified vector contains some specific string. It is possible to filter using this boolean value. See Introduction to stringr for details about stringr package.
library(tidyverse)
# ─ Attaching packages ──────────────────── tidyverse 1.2.1 ─
# ✔ ggplot2 2.2.1 ✔ purrr 0.2.4
# ✔ tibble 1.4.2 ✔ dplyr 0.7.4
# ✔ tidyr 0.7.2 ✔ stringr 1.2.0
# ✔ readr 1.1.1 ✔ forcats 0.3.0
# ─ Conflicts ───────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ─
# ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
# ✖ dplyr::lag() masks stats::lag()
mtcars$type <- rownames(mtcars)
mtcars %>%
filter(str_detect(type, 'Toyota|Mazda'))
# mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb type
# 1 21.0 6 160.0 110 3.90 2.620 16.46 0 1 4 4 Mazda RX4
# 2 21.0 6 160.0 110 3.90 2.875 17.02 0 1 4 4 Mazda RX4 Wag
# 3 33.9 4 71.1 65 4.22 1.835 19.90 1 1 4 1 Toyota Corolla
# 4 21.5 4 120.1 97 3.70 2.465 20.01 1 0 3 1 Toyota Corona
The good things about Stringr
We should use rather stringr::str_detect() than base::grepl(). This is because there are the following reasons.
- The functions provided by the
stringr package start with the prefix str_, which makes the code easier to read.
- The first argument of the functions of
stringr package is always the data.frame (or value), then comes the parameters.(Thank you Paolo)
object <- "stringr"
# The functions with the same prefix `str_`.
# The first argument is an object.
stringr::str_count(object) # -> 7
stringr::str_sub(object, 1, 3) # -> "str"
stringr::str_detect(object, "str") # -> TRUE
stringr::str_replace(object, "str", "") # -> "ingr"
# The function names without common points.
# The position of the argument of the object also does not match.
base::nchar(object) # -> 7
base::substr(object, 1, 3) # -> "str"
base::grepl("str", object) # -> TRUE
base::sub("str", "", object) # -> "ingr"
Benchmark
The results of the benchmark test are as follows. For large dataframe, str_detect is faster.
library(rbenchmark)
library(tidyverse)
# The data. Data expo 09. ASA Statistics Computing and Graphics
# http://stat-computing.org/dataexpo/2009/the-data.html
df <- read_csv("Downloads/2008.csv")
print(dim(df))
# [1] 7009728 29
benchmark(
"str_detect" = {df %>% filter(str_detect(Dest, 'MCO|BWI'))},
"grepl" = {df %>% filter(grepl('MCO|BWI', Dest))},
replications = 10,
columns = c("test", "replications", "elapsed", "relative", "user.self", "sys.self"))
# test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self
# 2 grepl 10 16.480 1.513 16.195 0.248
# 1 str_detect 10 10.891 1.000 9.594 1.281
