I'm trying to do a string search and replace across multiple columns in R. My code:
# Get columns of interest
selected_columns <- c(368,370,372,374,376,378,380,382,384,386,388,390,392,394)
#Perform grepl across multiple columns
df[,selected_columns][grepl('apples',df[,selected_columns],ignore.case = TRUE)] <- 'category1'
However, I'm getting the error:
Error: undefined columns selected
grep/grepl
works on vectors/matrix and not on data.frame/list. According to the
?grep`
x - a character vector where matches are sought, or an object which can be coerced by as.character to a character vector.
We can loop over the columns (lapply
) and replace
the values based on the match
df[, selected_columns] <- lapply(df[, selected_columns],
function(x) replace(x, grepl('apples', x, ignore.case = TRUE), 'category1'))
Or with dplyr
library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
df %>%
mutate_at(selected_columns, ~ replace(., str_detect(., 'apples'), 'category1'))