On 13-01-21 1:05 PM, Jeff Newmiller wrote:
So what is the special behavior of the ^ symbol when not at the beginning of 
the string that occurs when it is not escaped?

I think it retains its meaning as an assertion that it occurs at the beginning of the line, and so a pattern like "a^b" could never match anything. It's not very useful in this context, but I expect it's easier to implement in the case of complicated patterns, where some paths through the pattern put it at the beginning and others don't, e.g.

(a|)^b

has two possible patterns:  a^b and ^b.

Duncan Murdoch

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Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 13-01-21 11:48 AM, Jeff Newmiller wrote:
I am not sure I understand what worked perfectly, since it is my
understanding that ^ is only special at the beginning of the regex (to
anchor the pattern at the beginning of the target string) or as the
first character of a character set (to indicate exclusion of the listed
characters). In any other position the caret should behave like an
ordinary character. That is, your original pattern should have worked
as-is. This is supported by the help page documentation for regex in
the paragraph below the definition of [:xdigit:]. I think this is a bug
in R.

It's a documentation error rather than a bug.  The ^ character is
special anywhere in the extended RE syntax defined by the TRE library
or the Perl-compatible library that we use.  This is inconsistent with
the POSIX standard, which might be what you were thinking of.

Duncan Murdoch




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mtb...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Tsjerk, many thanks...that worked perfectly!

Mark Na



On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 9:36 AM, Tsjerk Wassenaar
<tsje...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Oh, I'm jetlagged. ^ is a control character for 'start of string'.
In
the
context of a character set it means negation: [^a-z].

Ciao,

Tsjerk


On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 4:33 PM, Tsjerk Wassenaar
<tsje...@gmail.com>wrote:

Hi Mark Na,

Try:

grepl("latitude\\^2",temp)

^ is a control character for negation, so you have to escape it.

Cheers,

Tsjerk


On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 4:26 PM, <mtb...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello R-helpers,

I am trying to search for string that includes the caret symbol,
using
the
following code:

grepl("latitude^2",temp)


And R doesn't like that. It gives me:

temp<-c("latitude^2","latitude and
latitude^2","longitude^2","longitude
and longitude^2")
temp
[1] "latitude^2"                "latitude and latitude^2"
"longitude^2"
              "longitude and longitude^2"
grepl("latitude^2",temp)
[1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE


I think this must a regex problem, but I can't find out to
specify
the
caret using regex.

I would appreciate any help you could provide.

Many thanks,

Mark Na

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--
Tsjerk A. Wassenaar, Ph.D.

post-doctoral researcher
Biocomputing Group
Department of Biological Sciences
2500 University Drive NW
Calgary, AB T2N 1N4
Canada




--
Tsjerk A. Wassenaar, Ph.D.

post-doctoral researcher
Biocomputing Group
Department of Biological Sciences
2500 University Drive NW
Calgary, AB T2N 1N4
Canada


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______________________________________________
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