Subset if string contains

Question

Basically I am having the following vector of strings.

first sp.z.o.o.

second s.a          #should be removed

third sp z o o 

fourth PP           #should be removed

fifth sp z o.o.

sixth               #should be removed

seventh sp z oo 

eighth LTD.         #should be removed

nineth sp-z-o-o

tenth spzoo

eleventh sp.zo.o

And from that I want to perform sub-setting only on those which contain all possible combination of sp z o.o. with and without spaces/double spaces, dots, comas and other symbols (such as * | - etc.). And for that I tried to use the following code, but it seems that it doesn't work.

sample <- df[grepl("(sp\\.z\\.o\\.o\\.)", df$col_1), ]

and also

sample <- df[grepl("(sp\\.*z\\.*o\\.*o\\.*)", df$col_1), ]

Answer 1

What you can do is use the below pattern:

sample <- subset(df, grepl('s.*p.*z.*o', col_1))

The above will help you to select the rows when you have the 'spzoo' in the string irrespective of anything in between.

You can also test the regex on a vector.

x <- c('first sp.z.o.o.', 'second s.a', 'third sp z o o', 'fourth PP',

       'fifth sp z o.o.', 'sixth', 'seventh sp z oo', 'eighth LTD.', 

       'nineth sp-z-o-o', 'tenth spzoo', 'eleventh sp.zo.o')

grep('s.*p.*z.*o', x, value = TRUE)

#[1] "first sp.z.o.o."  "third sp z o o"   "fifth sp z o.o."  "seventh sp z oo" 

#[5] "nineth sp-z-o-o"  "tenth spzoo"      "eleventh sp.zo.o"

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