29 Sep 2014

R: Deriving a new data frame column based on containing string

I’ve been playing around with R data frames a bit more and one thing I wanted to do was derive a new column based on the text contained in the existing column.

I started with something like this:

> x = data.frame(name = c("Java Hackathon", "Intro to Graphs", "Hands on Cypher"))
> x
             name
1  Java Hackathon
2 Intro to Graphs
3 Hands on Cypher

And I wanted to derive a new column based on whether or not the session was a practical one. The grepl function seemed to be the best tool for the job:

> grepl("Hackathon|Hands on|Hands On", x$name)
[1]  TRUE FALSE  TRUE

We can then add a column to our data frame with that output:

x$practical = grepl("Hackathon|Hands on|Hands On", x$name)

And we end up with the following:

> x
             name practical
1  Java Hackathon      TRUE
2 Intro to Graphs     FALSE
3 Hands on Cypher      TRUE

Not too tricky but it took me a bit too long to figure it out so I thought I’d save future Mark some time!

About the author

I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.