I don't care much for regmatches and haven't tried strextract, but I think replacing the character(0) by NA_character_ is almost always inappropriate if the match information comes from gregexpr.
I think strcapture() does a pretty good job of what I think you are trying to do. Perhaps adding an argument to map no match to NA instead of "" would give you just what you wanted. > x <- c("Groucho <grou...@marx.com>", "<ch...@marx.com>", "Harpo") > d <- strcapture("([[:alpha:]]+)?( *<([[:alpha:]. ]+@[[:alpha:]. ]+)>)?", x, proto=data.frame(Name=character(), Junk=character(), Address=character(), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)) > d[c("Name", "Address")] Name Address 1 Groucho grou...@marx.com 2 ch...@marx.com 3 Harpo > str(.Last.value) 'data.frame': 3 obs. of 2 variables: $ Name : chr "Groucho" "" "Harpo" $ Address: chr "grou...@marx.com" "ch...@marx.com" "" Bill Dunlap TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 11:31 AM Cyclic Group Z_1 <cyclicgroup...@yahoo.com> wrote: > I do think keeping the default behavior is desirable for backwards > compatibility; my suggestion is not to change default behavior but to add > an optional argument that allows a different behavior. Although this can be > implemented in a user-defined function, retaining empty matches facilitates > programmatic use, and seems to be something that should be available in > base R. It is available, for example, in MATLAB, a comparable array > language. > > Alternatively, perhaps a nomatch (or maybe emptymatch) argument in the > spirit of `[.data.table`? That is, an argument nomatch where nomatch = NULL > (the default) results in drops for vector outputs and character(0) for list > outputs and nomatch = NA results in insertion of NA_character_, and nomatch > = '' results in insertion of empty string. > > I can submit proposed patch code if others think this is a good idea. > > What are your thoughts on the proposed alteration to (currently > nonexported) strextract? I assume (maybe wrongly) that the plan is to > eventually export that function. > > Thank you, > CG > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel