Reorganising bigger structure of strings

This commit is contained in:
Hadley Wickham 2021-12-05 10:52:47 -06:00
parent 26ab1cc1eb
commit 915ebf4463
3 changed files with 194 additions and 286 deletions

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@ -10,6 +10,66 @@ library(tidyr)
library(tibble)
```
### Encoding
You will not generally find the base R `Encoding()` to be useful because it only supports three different encodings (and interpreting what they mean is non-trivial) and it only tells you the encoding that R thinks it is, not what it really is.
And typically the problem is that the declaring encoding is wrong.
The tidyverse follows best practices[^prog-strings-1] of using UTF-8 everywhere, so any string you create with the tidyverse will use UTF-8.
It's still possible to have problems, but they'll typically arise during data import.
Once you've diagnosed you have an encoding problem, you should fix it in data import (i.e. by using the `encoding` argument to `readr::locale()`).
[^prog-strings-1]: <http://utf8everywhere.org>
### Length and subsetting
This seems like a straightforward computation if you're only familiar with English, but things get complex quick when working with other languages.
Four most common are Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and Devangari, which represent three different systems of writing systems:
- Latin uses an alphabet, where each consonant and vowel gets its own letter.
- Chinese.
Logograms.
Half width vs full width.
English letters are roughly twice as high as they are wide.
Chinese characters are roughly square.
- Arabic is an abjad, only consonants are written and vowels are optionally as diacritics.
Additionally, it's written from right-to-left, so the first letter is the letter on the far right.
- Devangari is an abugida where each symbol represents a consonant-vowel pair, , vowel notation secondary.
> For instance, 'ch' is two letters in English and Latin, but considered to be one letter in Czech and Slovak.
> --- <http://utf8everywhere.org>
```{r}
# But
str_split("check", boundary("character", locale = "cs_CZ"))
```
This is a problem even with Latin alphabets because many languages use **diacritics**, glyphs added to the basic alphabet.
This is a problem because Unicode provides two ways of representing characters with accents: many common characters have a special codepoint, but others can be built up from individual components.
```{r}
x <- c("á", "x́")
str_length(x)
# str_width(x)
str_sub(x, 1, 1)
# stri_width(c("全形", "ab"))
# 0, 1, or 2
# but this assumes no font substitution
```
```{r}
cyrillic_a <- "А"
latin_a <- "A"
cyrillic_a == latin_a
stringi::stri_escape_unicode(cyrillic_a)
stringi::stri_escape_unicode(latin_a)
```
### str_c
`NULL`s are silently dropped.
@ -51,8 +111,6 @@ str_view_all(x, boundary("word"))
str_extract_all(x, boundary("word"))
```
###
### Extract
```{r}

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@ -264,7 +264,7 @@ Collectively, these operators are called **quantifiers** because they quantify h
b. Have three or more vowels in a row.
c. Have two or more vowel-consonant pairs in a row.
4. Solve the beginner regexp crosswords at [\<https://regexcrossword.com/challenges/beginner\>](https://regexcrossword.com/challenges/beginner){.uri}.
4. Solve the beginner regexp crosswords at [\<https://regexcrossword.com/challenges/beginner>](https://regexcrossword.com/challenges/beginner){.uri}.
## Grouping and backreferences
@ -475,3 +475,9 @@ See the Stack Overflow discussion at <http://stackoverflow.com/a/201378> for mor
Don't forget that you're in a programming language and you have other tools at your disposal.
Instead of creating one complex regular expression, it's often easier to write a series of simpler regexps.
If you get stuck trying to create a single regexp that solves your problem, take a step back and think if you could break the problem down into smaller pieces, solving each challenge before moving onto the next one.
### Exercises
1. In the previous example, you might have noticed that the regular expression matched "flickered", which is not a colour. Modify the regex to fix the problem.
2. Find all words that come after a "number" like "one", "two", "three" etc. Pull out both the number and the word.
3. Find all contractions. Separate out the pieces before and after the apostrophe.

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@ -6,12 +6,14 @@ status("restructuring")
## Introduction
This chapter introduces you to strings.
You'll learn the basics of how strings work in R and how to create them "by hand".
You'll also learn the basics of regular expressions, a powerful, but sometimes cryptic language for describing string patterns.
Regular expression are a big topic, so we'll come back to them again in Chapter \@ref(regular-expressions) to discuss more of the details.
We'll finish up with a discussion of some of the new challenges that arise when working with non-English strings.
So far, we've used a bunch of strings without really talking about how they work or the powerful tools you have to work with them.
This chapter begins by diving into the details of creating strings, and from strings, character vectors.
You'll then learn a grab bag of handy string functions before we dive into creating strings from data, then extracting data from strings.
We'll then cover the basics of regular expressions, a powerful, but very concise and sometimes cryptic, language for describing patterns in string.
The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of where your exceptions of English might steer you wrong when working with text from other languages.
This chapter is paired with two other chapters.
Regular expression are a big topic, so we'll come back to them again in Chapter \@ref(regular-expressions).
We'll come back to strings again in Chapter \@ref(programming-with-strings) where we'll think about them about more from a programming perspective than a data analysis perspective.
### Prerequisites
@ -55,13 +57,6 @@ If you forget to close a quote, you'll see `+`, the continuation character:
If this happen to you and you can't figure out which quote you need to close, press Escape to cancel, then try again.
You can combine multiple strings into a character vector by using `c()`:
```{r}
x <- c("first string", "second string", "third string")
x
```
### Escapes
To include a literal single or double quote in a string you can use `\` to "escape" it:
@ -127,7 +122,25 @@ x
str_view(x)
```
## Length and subsetting
Now that you've learned the basics of creating strings by "hand", we'll go into the details of creating strings from other strings, starting with combining strings.
### Vectors
You can combine multiple strings into a character vector by using `c()`:
```{r}
x <- c("first string", "second string", "third string")
x
```
You can create a length zero character vector with `character()`.
This is not usually very useful, but can help you understand the general principle of functions by giving them an unusual input.
### Exercises
## Handy functions
### Length
It's natural to think about the letters that make up an individual string.
(Not every language uses letters, which we'll talk about more in Section \@ref(other-languages)).
@ -150,6 +163,8 @@ babynames %>%
count(name, wt = n, sort = TRUE)
```
### Subsetting
You can extract parts of a string using `str_sub(string, start, end)`.
The `start` and `end` arguments are inclusive, so the length of the returned string will be `end - start + 1`:
@ -180,42 +195,7 @@ babynames %>%
)
```
Sometimes you'll get a column that's made up of individual fixed length strings that have been joined together:
```{r}
df <- tribble(
~ sex_year_age,
"M200115",
"F201503",
)
```
You can extract the columns using `str_sub()`:
```{r}
df %>% mutate(
sex = str_sub(sex_year_age, 1, 1),
year = str_sub(sex_year_age, 2, 5),
age = str_sub(sex_year_age, 6, 7),
)
```
Or use the `separate()` helper function:
```{r}
df %>%
separate(sex_year_age, c("sex", "year", "age"), c(1, 5))
```
Note that you give `separate()` three columns but only two positions --- that's because you're telling `separate()` where to break up the string.
TODO: draw diagram to emphasise that it's the space between the characters.
Later on, we'll come back two related problems: the components have varying length and are a separated by a character, or they have an varying number of components and you want to split up into rows, rather than columns.
### Exercises
1. Use `str_length()` and `str_sub()` to extract the middle letter from each baby name. What will you do if the string has an even number of characters?
Later, we'll come back to the problem of extracting data from strings.
### Long strings
@ -233,7 +213,9 @@ str_trunc(x, 30)
str_view(str_wrap(x, 30))
```
##
### Exercises
1. Use `str_length()` and `str_sub()` to extract the middle letter from each baby name. What will you do if the string has an even number of characters?
## Combining strings
@ -278,6 +260,16 @@ starwars %>%
mutate(greeting = str_c("Hi! I'm ", name, "."), .after = name)
```
### `str_dup()`
`str_c(a, a, a)` is like `a + a + a`, what's the equivalent of `3 * a`?
That's `str_dup()`:
```{r}
str_dup(letters[1:3], 3)
str_dup("a", 1:3)
```
### Glue
Another powerful way of combining strings is with the glue package.
@ -301,12 +293,13 @@ starwars %>%
You can use any valid R code inside of `{}`, but it's a good idea to pull complex calculations out into their own variables so you can more easily check your work.
Differences with `NA` handling.
Differences with `NA` handling?
### `str_flatten()`
`str_c()` combines multiple character vectors into a single character vector; the output is the same length as the input.
An related function is `str_flatten()`:[^strings-7] it takes a character vector and returns a single string:
So far I've shown you vectorised functions that work will with `mutate()`: the output of these functions is the same length as the input.
There's one last important function that's a summary function: the output is always length 1, regardless of the length of the input.
That's `str_flatten()`:[^strings-7] it takes a character vector and always returns a single string:
[^strings-7]: The base R equivalent is `paste()` with the `collapse` argument set.
@ -336,7 +329,7 @@ df %>%
### Exercises
1. Compare the results of `paste0()` with `str_c()` for the following inputs:
1. Compare and contrast the results of `paste0()` with `str_c()` for the following inputs:
```{r, eval = FALSE}
str_c("hi ", NA)
@ -344,9 +337,18 @@ df %>%
str_c(letters[1:2], letters[1:3])
```
2. What does `str_flatten()` return if you give it a length 0 character vector?
## Splitting apart strings
## Detect matches
Common for multiple variables worth of data to be stored in a single string.
In this section you'll learn how to use various functions tidyr to extract them.
Waiting on: <https://github.com/tidyverse/tidyups/pull/15>
## Working with patterns
### Detect matches
To determine if a character vector matches a pattern, use `str_detect()`.
It returns a logical vector the same length as the input:
@ -377,6 +379,8 @@ babynames %>%
(Note that this gives us the proportion of names that contain an x; if you wanted the proportion of babies given a name containing an x, you'd need to perform a weighted mean).
### Count matches
A variation on `str_detect()` is `str_count()`: rather than a simple yes or no, it tells you how many matches there are in a string:
```{r}
@ -394,14 +398,23 @@ babynames %>%
)
```
### Exercises
You also wonder if any names include special characters like periods:
1. What word has the highest number of vowels? What word has the highest proportion of vowels? (Hint: what is the denominator?)
```{r}
babynames %>%
distinct(name) %>%
head() %>%
mutate(
periods = str_count(name, "."),
)
```
## Introduction to regular expressions
That's weird!
Before we can continue on we need to discuss the second argument to `str_detect()` --- the pattern that you want to match.
Above, I used a simple string, but the pattern actually a much richer tool called a **regular expression**.
### Introduction to regular expressions
To understand what's going on, we need to discuss what the second argument to `str_detect()` really is.
It looks like a simple string, but it's pattern actually a much richer tool called a **regular expression**.
A regular expression uses special characters to match string patterns.
For example, `.` will match any character, so `"a."` will match any string that contains an a followed by another character:
@ -426,17 +439,6 @@ There are three useful **quantifiers** that can be applied to other pattern: `?`
- `ab*` matches an "a", followed by any number of bs
You can use `()` to control precedence:
- `(ab)?` optionally matches "ab"
- `(ab)+` matches one or more "ab" repeats
```{r}
str_view(c("aba", "ababab", "abbbbbb"), "ab+")
str_view(c("aba", "ababab", "abbbbbb"), "(ab)+")
```
There are various alternatives to `.` that match a restricted set of characters.
One useful operator is the **character class:** `[abcd]` match "a", "b", "c", or "d"; `[^abcd]` matches anything **except** "a", "b", "c", or "d".
@ -457,15 +459,7 @@ str_view_all("x X xy", regex(".Y", ignore_case = TRUE))
We'll come back to case later, because it's not trivial for many languages.
### Exercises
1. For each of the following challenges, try solving it by using both a single regular expression, and a combination of multiple `str_detect()` calls.
a. Find all words that start or end with `x`.
b. Find all words that start with a vowel and end with a consonant.
c. Are there any words that contain at least one of each different vowel?
## Replacing matches
### Replacing matches
`str_replace_all()` allow you to replace matches with new strings.
The simplest use is to replace a pattern with a fixed string:
@ -490,226 +484,76 @@ Use in `mutate()`
Using pipe inside mutate.
Recommendation to make a function, and think about testing it --- don't need formal tests, but useful to build up a set of positive and negative test cases as you.
#### Exercises
### Exercises
1. Replace all forward slashes in a string with backslashes.
1. What word has the highest number of vowels?
What word has the highest proportion of vowels?
(Hint: what is the denominator?)
2. Implement a simple version of `str_to_lower()` using `str_replace_all()`.
2. For each of the following challenges, try solving it by using both a single regular expression, and a combination of multiple `str_detect()` calls.
3. Switch the first and last letters in `words`.
a. Find all words that start or end with `x`.
b. Find all words that start with a vowel and end with a consonant.
c. Are there any words that contain at least one of each different vowel?
3. Replace all forward slashes in a string with backslashes.
4. Implement a simple version of `str_to_lower()` using `str_replace_all()`.
5. Switch the first and last letters in `words`.
Which of those strings are still `words`?
## Extract full matches
## Locale dependent operations {#other-languages}
If your data is in a tibble, it's often easier to use `tidyr::extract()`.
It works like `str_match()` but requires you to name the matches, which are then placed in new columns:
So far all of our examples have been using English.
The details of the many ways other languages are different to English are too diverse to detail here, but I wanted to give a quick outline of the functions who's behaviour differs based on your **locale**, the set of settings that vary from country to country.
```{r}
tibble(sentence = sentences) %>%
tidyr::extract(
sentence, c("article", "noun"), "(a|the) ([^ ]+)",
remove = FALSE
)
```
### Exercises
1. In the previous example, you might have noticed that the regular expression matched "flickered", which is not a colour. Modify the regex to fix the problem.
2. Find all words that come after a "number" like "one", "two", "three" etc. Pull out both the number and the word.
3. Find all contractions. Separate out the pieces before and after the apostrophe.
## Strings -> Columns
## Separate
`separate()` pulls apart one column into multiple columns, by splitting wherever a separator character appears.
Take `table3`:
```{r}
table3
```
The `rate` column contains both `cases` and `population` variables, and we need to split it into two variables.
`separate()` takes the name of the column to separate, and the names of the columns to separate into, as shown in Figure \@ref(fig:tidy-separate) and the code below.
```{r}
table3 %>%
separate(rate, into = c("cases", "population"))
```
```{r tidy-separate, echo = FALSE, out.width = "75%", fig.cap = "Separating `rate` into `cases` and `population` to make `table3` tidy", fig.alt = "Two panels, one with a data frame with three columns (country, year, and rate) and the other with a data frame with four columns (country, year, cases, and population). Arrows show how the rate variable is separated into two variables: cases and population."}
knitr::include_graphics("images/tidy-17.png")
```
By default, `separate()` will split values wherever it sees a non-alphanumeric character (i.e. a character that isn't a number or letter).
For example, in the code above, `separate()` split the values of `rate` at the forward slash characters.
If you wish to use a specific character to separate a column, you can pass the character to the `sep` argument of `separate()`.
For example, we could rewrite the code above as:
```{r eval = FALSE}
table3 %>%
separate(rate, into = c("cases", "population"), sep = "/")
```
`separate_rows()`
## Strings -> Rows
```{r}
starwars %>%
select(name, eye_color) %>%
filter(str_detect(eye_color, ", ")) %>%
separate_rows(eye_color)
```
### Exercises
1. Split up a string like `"apples, pears, and bananas"` into individual components.
2. Why is it better to split up by `boundary("word")` than `" "`?
3. What does splitting with an empty string (`""`) do?
Experiment, and then read the documentation.
## Other writing systems {#other-languages}
Unicode is a system for representing the many writing systems used around the world.
Fundamental unit is a **code point**.
This usually represents something like a letter or symbol, but might also be formatting like a diacritic mark or a (e.g.) the skin tone of an emoji.
Character vs grapheme cluster.
Include some examples from <https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/>.
All stringr functions default to the English locale.
This ensures that your code works the same way on every system, avoiding subtle bugs.
Maybe things you think are true, but aren't list?
### Encoding
You will not generally find the base R `Encoding()` to be useful because it only supports three different encodings (and interpreting what they mean is non-trivial) and it only tells you the encoding that R thinks it is, not what it really is.
And typically the problem is that the declaring encoding is wrong.
The tidyverse follows best practices[^strings-8] of using UTF-8 everywhere, so any string you create with the tidyverse will use UTF-8.
It's still possible to have problems, but they'll typically arise during data import.
Once you've diagnosed you have an encoding problem, you should fix it in data import (i.e. by using the `encoding` argument to `readr::locale()`).
[^strings-8]: <http://utf8everywhere.org>
### Length and subsetting
This seems like a straightforward computation if you're only familiar with English, but things get complex quick when working with other languages.
Four most common are Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and Devangari, which represent three different systems of writing systems:
- Latin uses an alphabet, where each consonant and vowel gets its own letter.
- Chinese.
Logograms.
Half width vs full width.
English letters are roughly twice as high as they are wide.
Chinese characters are roughly square.
- Arabic is an abjad, only consonants are written and vowels are optionally as diacritics.
Additionally, it's written from right-to-left, so the first letter is the letter on the far right.
- Devangari is an abugida where each symbol represents a consonant-vowel pair, , vowel notation secondary.
> For instance, 'ch' is two letters in English and Latin, but considered to be one letter in Czech and Slovak.
> --- <http://utf8everywhere.org>
```{r}
# But
str_split("check", boundary("character", locale = "cs_CZ"))
```
This is a problem even with Latin alphabets because many languages use **diacritics**, glyphs added to the basic alphabet.
This is a problem because Unicode provides two ways of representing characters with accents: many common characters have a special codepoint, but others can be built up from individual components.
```{r}
x <- c("á", "x́")
str_length(x)
# str_width(x)
str_sub(x, 1, 1)
# stri_width(c("全形", "ab"))
# 0, 1, or 2
# but this assumes no font substitution
```
```{r}
cyrillic_a <- "А"
latin_a <- "A"
cyrillic_a == latin_a
stringi::stri_escape_unicode(cyrillic_a)
stringi::stri_escape_unicode(latin_a)
```
### Collation rules
`coll()`: compare strings using standard **coll**ation rules.
This is useful for doing case insensitive matching.
Note that `coll()` takes a `locale` parameter that controls which rules are used for comparing characters.
Unfortunately different parts of the world use different rules!B
oth `fixed()` and `regex()` have `ignore_case` arguments, but they do not allow you to pick the locale: they always use the default locale.
You can see what that is with the following code; more on stringi later.
```{r}
a1 <- "\u00e1"
a2 <- "a\u0301"
c(a1, a2)
a1 == a2
str_detect(a1, fixed(a2))
str_detect(a1, coll(a2))
```
The downside of `coll()` is speed; because the rules for recognising which characters are the same are complicated, `coll()` is relatively slow compared to `regex()` and `fixed()`.
### Upper and lower case
Relatively few writing systems have upper and lower case: Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, plus a handful of lessor known languages.
Above I used `str_to_lower()` to change the text to lower case.
You can also use `str_to_upper()` or `str_to_title()`.
However, changing case is more complicated than it might at first appear because different languages have different rules for changing case.
You can pick which set of rules to use by specifying a locale:
```{r}
# Turkish has two i's: with and without a dot, and it
# has a different rule for capitalising them:
str_to_upper(c("i", "ı"))
str_to_upper(c("i", "ı"), locale = "tr")
```
- Words are broken up by spaces.
- Words are composed of individual spaces.
- All letters in a word are written down.
The locale is specified as a ISO 639 language code, which is a two or three letter abbreviation.
If you don't already know the code for your language, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes) has a good list, and you can see which are supported with `stringi::stri_locale_list()`.
If you leave the locale blank, it will use English.
The locale also affects case-insensitive matching, which `coll(ignore_case = TRUE)` which you can control with `coll()`:
Base R string functions automatically use your locale current locale, but stringr functions all default to the English locale.
This ensures that your code works the same way on every system, avoiding subtle bugs.
To choose a different locale you'll need to specify the `locale` argument; seeing that a function has a locale argument tells you that its behaviour will differ from locale to locale.
```{r}
i <- c("Iİiı")
Here are a few places where locale matter:S
str_view_all(i, coll("i", ignore_case = TRUE))
str_view_all(i, coll("i", ignore_case = TRUE, locale = "tr"))
```
- Upper and lower case: only relatively few languages have upper and lower case (Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, plus a handful of lessor known languages). The rules are not te same in every language that uses these alphabets. For example, Turkish has two i's: with and without a dot, and it has a different rule for capitalising them:
You can also do case insensitive matching this `fixed(ignore_case = TRUE)`, but this uses a simple approximation which will not work in all cases.
```{r}
str_to_upper(c("i", "ı"))
str_to_upper(c("i", "ı"), locale = "tr")
```
### Sorting
- This also affects case insensitive matching with `coll(ignore_case = TRUE)` which you can control with `coll()`:
Unicode collation algorithm: <https://unicode.org/reports/tr10/>
```{r}
i <- c("Iİiı")
Another important operation that's affected by the locale is sorting.
The base R `order()` and `sort()` functions sort strings using the current locale.
If you want robust behaviour across different computers, you may want to use `str_sort()` and `str_order()` which take an additional `locale` argument.
str_view_all(i, coll("i", ignore_case = TRUE))
str_view_all(i, coll("i", ignore_case = TRUE, locale = "tr"))
```
Can also control the "strength", which determines how accents are sorted.
- Many characters with diacritics can be recorded in multiple ways: these will print identically but won't match with `fixed()`.
```{r}
str_sort(c("a", "ch", "c", "h"))
str_sort(c("a", "ch", "c", "h"), locale = "cs_CZ")
```
```{r}
a1 <- "\u00e1"
a2 <- "a\u0301"
c(a1, a2)
a1 == a2
TODO: add connection to `arrange()`
str_view(a1, fixed(a2))
str_view(a1, coll(a2))
```
- Another important operation that's affected by the locale is sorting. The base R `order()` and `sort()` functions sort strings using the current locale. If you want robust behaviour across different computers, you may want to use `str_sort()` and `str_order()` which take an additional `locale` argument. Here's an example: in Czech, "ch" is a digraph that appears after `h` in the alphabet.
```{r}
str_sort(c("a", "ch", "c", "h"))
str_sort(c("a", "ch", "c", "h"), locale = "cs")
```
TODO after dplyr 1.1.0: discuss `arrange()`