How to replace single word line in multiple lines?

I have a data frame of some strings. Some lines has single word which I want to replace with blank. I am able to retrieve the word but at the time of replacing them I get warning message

Warning message: In gsub(pattern =
text[lengths(gregexpr("[[:alpha:]]+", text)) == : argument
'pattern' has length > 1 and only the first element will be used

Only first word gets replaces and rest are remains as it is. I want replace all the single words in the data frame.

Code I am using as below.

text <- c("Because I could not stop for Death -",
"Word1",
"He kindly stopped for me -",
"Word2",
"The Carriage held but just Ourselves - ",
"word3",
"and Immortality")

gsub(pattern = text[lengths(gregexpr("[[:alpha:]]+", text)) == 1], "", text)


I am expecting below output.

"Because I could not stop for Death -",
"He kindly stopped for me -",
"The Carriage held but just Ourselves - ",
"and Immortality"


3 Answers
3

A simple logical indexing will do the trick here since the words you want to keep seem to be at positions 1, 3, 5, ... and so on, i.e.

text[c(TRUE, FALSE)]
#[1] "Because I could not stop for Death -" "He kindly stopped for me -"
#[3] "The Carriage held but just Ourselves - " "and Immortality"


a=gsub("^w+$","",text)
[1] "Because I could not stop for Death -" ""
[3] "He kindly stopped for me -" ""
[5] "The Carriage held but just Ourselves - " ""
[7] "and Immortality"

grep("w",a,value = T)
[1] "Because I could not stop for Death -" "He kindly stopped for me -"
[3] "The Carriage held but just Ourselves - " "and Immortality"


or you can simply do

grep("w+s",text,value = T)
[1] "Because I could not stop for Death -" "He kindly stopped for me -"
[3] "The Carriage held but just Ourselves - " "and Immortality"


Could you please try following and let me know if this helps you.

text <- c("Because I could not stop for Death -",
"Word1",
"He kindly stopped for me -",
"Word2",
"The Carriage held but just Ourselves - ",
"word3",
"and Immortality")


code for getting OP's required output:

text[!grepl("[Ww]ord[0-9]+", text)]


Output will be as follows.

[1] "Because I could not stop for Death -" "He kindly stopped for me -"
[3] "The Carriage held but just Ourselves - " "and Immortality"


For grepl from help page:

grepl

grepl returns a logical vector (match or not for each element of x).

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