在 R 中将“-”和大写字母中的字符串更改为无大写字母和空格

Question

I am having some issues with a regular expression I hope you can help me with. I have a dataset that looks like this:

name <- c("Chester-le-Street",  
      "Westbury-on-Trym",
      "Easton-in-Gordano",  
      "Weston-super-Mare",
      "Bourne End-cum-Hedsor",
      "Amersham-on-the-Hill East",
      "South Westbury-on-Trym")

What I want to do is mainly two things:

1. remove the symbols "-"
2. Replace the first letter after where a "-" was by a capital letter.

In a way that would result in the following:

target_name <- c("Chester Le Street",   
          "Westbury On Trym",
          "Easton In Gordano",  
          "Weston Super Mare",
          "Bourne End Cum Hedsor",
          "Amersham On The Hill East",
          "South Westbury On Trym")

Been trying many different things that take very long and I never quite get exactly what I am going for nonetheless. Would really appreciate any help. Thanks.

Answer 1

You could use -(\w) as your pattern which is a dash followed by a letter. Capture the letter as group 1, then replace that with a space and the Capital letter of the captured group 1. ie \U\1 . Note that to do this, we escape the \ hence have 2 backslash in the R code

gsub("-(\\w)", " \\U\\1", name, perl = TRUE)
[1] "Chester Le Street"         "Westbury On Trym"          "Easton In Gordano"        
[4] "Weston Super Mare"         "Bourne End Cum Hedsor"     "Amersham On The Hill East"
[7] "South Westbury On Trym"  

Or:

library(stringr)
str_to_title(str_replace_all(name, '-', ' '))
[1] "Chester Le Street"         "Westbury On Trym"          "Easton In Gordano"        
[4] "Weston Super Mare"         "Bourne End Cum Hedsor"     "Amersham On The Hill East"
[7] "South Westbury On Trym"  

Answer 2

library(stringr)

name <- c("Chester-le-Street",  
          "Westbury-on-Trym",
          "Easton-in-Gordano",  
          "Weston-super-Mare",
          "Bourne End-cum-Hedsor",
          "Amersham-on-the-Hill East",
          "South Westbury-on-Trym")

name %>%
  str_replace_all("-", " ") %>%
  str_to_title()