Re: [R] Regexpr with "."

[Barry Rowlingson]

Thompson, Trevor wrote:

It looks like R is treating every character in the string as if it were
decimal.  I didn't see anything in the help file about "." being some kind
of special character.  Any idea why R is treating a decimal this way in
these functions?   Any suggestions how to get around this?
'.' is the regexpr character for matching any single character!

> regexpr("a.e", "Female.Alabama")
[1] 4
 To actually search for a dot, you need to 'escape' it with a 
backslash, but of course the backslash needs escaping itself, with 
another backslash. Luckily that backslash doesn't need escaping, 
otherwise we would quickly run out of patience.

> regexpr("\\.", "Female.Alabama")
[1] 7
Baz

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