Categorize chars using dictionaries in R

Question

I want to categorize products in a basket using dictionaries with all the product sorts of a category. I want to check in particular if a product from my basket is an element of my dictionary, and if this is true I would like to replace the product with the name of the category (dictionary).

I imported my dictionary in a list in csv and tried to compare the products of my basket with %in% but this didn't work.

BD19jfiles[[i]]$product$name return the products of a basket. Pistolets is a list with chars (the dictionary).

l <- length(BD19jfiles)
for(i in 1:l) {
if(BD19jfiles[[i]]$product$name %in% Pistolets){
grepl('Pistolet', BD19jfiles[[i]]$product$name)
}
}

I would like to replace the products who return true for 'BD19jfiles[[i]]$product$name %in% Pistolets' with the word 'Pistolet'

Answer 1

We can use lapply to loop over the list , and update the 'name' element by checking for 'PISTOLET' substring in that element with grepl and assign those to "Pistolet"

lapply(BD19jfiles, function(x) {
   x$product$name[grepl("PISTOLET", x$product$name)] <- "Pistolet"
    x
    }) 

---

If the dictionary identifier is Pistolets

lapply(BD19jfiles, function(x) {
     x$product$name[x$product$name %in% Pistolets] <- "Pistolet"
     x
     })

If it is a substring, use grepl

nm1 <- paste0("\\b(", paste(unlist(Pistolets), collapse="|"), ")\\b")
out <- lapply(BD19jfiles, function(x) {

       x$product$name[grepl(nm1, x$product$name)] <- "Pistolet" 
       x
        })  

Answer 2

lapply(BD19jfiles, function(x){
   x$product$name=gsub(paste(Pistolets,collapse="|"),"Pistolets",x$product$name)
   x
}

Here you are changing words that match any of the words in your dictionary to Pistolet .