R - Find if characters of a vector are in another vector

Question

I have a doubt very similar to this topic here: Find matches of a vector of strings in another vector of strings .

I have a vector of clients, and if the name indicates that is a commercial client, I need to change the type in my data.frame.

So, suppose that:

commercial_names <- c("BAKERY","MARKET", "SCHOOL", "CINEMA")
clients <- c("JOHN XX","REESE YY","BAKERY ZZ","SAMANTHA WW")

I tried the code in the topic cited before, but I had an error:

> grepl(paste(commercial_names, collape="|"),clients)
[1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
Warning message:
In grepl(paste(commercial_names, collape = "|"), clients) :
  argument 'pattern' has length > 1 and only the first element will be used

What am I doing wrong? I would thank any help.

Answer 1

Your code is correct but for a typo:

grepl(paste0(commercial_names, collapse = "|"), clients) # typo: collape
[1] FALSE FALSE  TRUE FALSE

Given the typo, the commercial_names are not collapsed.

Answer 2

Not sure how to do this with a one-liner but a loop seems to do the trick.

sapply(clients, function(client) {
  any(str_detect(client, commercial_names))
})
> JOHN XX    REESE YY   BAKERY ZZ SAMANTHA WW 
> FALSE       FALSE        TRUE       FALSE 

Answer 3

I found another way of to do this, with the command %like% of package data.table :

> clients %like% paste(commercial_names,collapse = "|")
[1] FALSE FALSE  TRUE FALSE

Answer 4

You can do something like this too:

clients.first <- gsub(" ..", "", clients)
clients.first %in% commercial_names

This returns:

[1] FALSE FALSE  TRUE FALSE

You might need to change the regular expression for gsub if your clients data is more heterogeneous though.