I'm trying to use the regexpr function to locate the decimal in a character string. Regardless of the position of the decimal, the function returns 1. For example,
regexpr(".", "Female.Alabama")
[1] 1 attr(,"match.length") [1] 1
In trying to figure out what was going on here, I tried the below command:
gsub(".", ",", "Female.Alabama")
[1] ",,,,,,,,,,,,,,"
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?
Thanks for any suggestions.
-Trevor
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Think about the meaning of "." in regular expression (it needs to be escaped as being a special character!):
gsub("\\.", ",", "Female.Alabama")
or
regexpr("\\.", "Female.Alabama")Uwe Ligges
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