使用r将单词中的匹配单词替换为单词

Question

I am trying to replace a string with a word after having found a match.

I have the following words:

bigrams = c("technical lead", "project engineer", "head of")

and the following string:

string = c("technical lead rotatives", "resident project engineer", "head of medicine", "senior project engineer")

I would like the answer to be:

answer = c("technical lead", "project engineer", "head of", "project engineer")

I have tried various things such as:

gsub("^(\\w).* project engineer$", " project engineer", string)

which only works for a case. Any help. Sorry I am not very good at working with strings. thanks!

Answer 1

Have a look at stringr package, it makes life easier: https://stringr.tidyverse.org/

library(stringr)

bigrams = c("technical lead", "project engineer", "head of")
string = c("technical lead rotatives", "resident project engineer", "head of medicine", "senior project engineer")
answer = c("technical lead", "project engineer", "head of", "project engineer")

pattern <- paste(bigrams, collapse = "|")
result <- str_extract(string, pattern)
identical(answer, result)
# TRUE