rstringdataframereorderlist

Reposition the words enclosed in [ ] in a sentence using R

[VN] [Ren'Py] Game1 [Author1]

[VN] [Ren'Py] Game2 [Author2]

[VN] [Ren'Py] Game3 [Author3]

I have these 3 lines saved in a text file. I want to rearrange them in such a way that my output looks like:

Game1 [Author1] [VN] [Ren'Py]

Game2 [Author2] [VN] [Ren'Py]

Game3 [Author3] [VN] [Ren'Py]

When I first read the text file into RStudio, it creates a dataframe with 1 variable and the class of all the game names are as character.

a = read.csv("games.txt")

I then use grepl to exract all the names that contain [ ]

b = a$name[grepl("\\[.*", a$name)]

Here again I face an issue. I actually only want to grepl those names that start with [

b = a$name[grepl("^\\[.*", a$name)]

But using the caret does not work. Doing so gives me a dataframe of 0 columns and 3 rows

Now, b is a character of length 3 and running

b[1]
b[2]
b[3]

gives me the entire name of each game respectively

I then run strsplit to separate the words of the games by the spaces

c = strsplit(b, " +")

Now c is of class "list" of length 3

I then tried to run this code

seq = 1 : length(c)
y = NULL
for (i in seq){
  tmp <- c[[i]][1]
  y[i] = tmp
  c[[i]][-1]
}

This ideally should have extracted [VN] from c[[1]] , stored it in y[1] and then removed [VN] from c[[1]].

However, y gets rewritten everytime and when the loop completes only c[[3]][1] is stored in y.

I am now stuck here and have very little idea about how I can proceed to get my output. Please advise

Solution

  • Is this what you're looking for?

    Data:

    x <- c("[VN] [Ren'Py] Game1 [Author1]")

    Solution:

    sub("(\\[[^[]+) (\\[[^[]+) (\\w+) (\\[[^[]+)", "\\3 \\1 \\2 \\4", x)

    Result:

    [1] "Game1 [VN] [Ren'Py] [Author1]"