[R] [R-pkgs] stringr 0.5

Hadley Wickham
Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:01:25 -0000

# stringr

Strings are not glamorous, high-profile components of R, but they do
play a big role in many data cleaning and preparations tasks. R
provides a solid set of string operations, but because they have grown
organically over time, they can be inconsistent and a little hard to
learn. Additionally, they lag behind the string operations in other
programming languages, so that some things that are easy to do in
languages like Ruby or Python are rather hard to do in R. The
`stringr` package aims to remedy these problems by providing a clean,
modern interface to common string operations.

More concretely, `stringr`:

 * Processes factors and characters in the same way.

 * Gives functions consistent names and arguments.

 * Simplifies string operations by eliminating options that you don't need
   95% of the time.

 * Produces outputs than can easily be used as inputs. This includes ensuring
   that missing inputs result in missing outputs, and zero length inputs
   result in zero length outputs.

 * Completes R's string handling functions with useful functions from other
   programming languages.

stringr 0.5
==========
* new `str_wrap` function which gives `strwrap` output in a more convenient
  format

* new `word` function extract words from a string given user defined
  separator (thanks to suggestion by David Cooper)

* `str_locate` now returns consistent type when matching empty string (thanks
  to Stavros Macrakis)

* new `str_count` counts number of matches in a string.

* `str_pad` and `str_trim` receive performance tweaks - for large vectors this
  should give at least a two order of magnitude speed up

* str_length returns NA for invalid multibyte strings

* fix small bug in internal `recyclable` function


--
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/

_______________________________________________
R-packages mailing list
R-packages at r-project.org