Just Quickly: What I usually want from stringr | Credibly Curious

[utterances-bot]

Just Quickly: What I usually want from stringr | Credibly Curious

https://www.njtierney.com/post/2019/06/19/quick-stringr/

[slager]

A tricky thing is that the period is a special wildcard character in R regular expressions. When the goal is to filter on a filename extension, escaping it is the safest way to go:

library(stringr)
items2 <- c("thing1",
            "notcsv",
            "sacvy",
            "item.csv",
            "wat.csv")
items2[grepl(".csv$", items2)]
#> [1] "notcsv"   "item.csv" "wat.csv"
str_subset(items2, ".csv$")
#> [1] "notcsv"   "item.csv" "wat.csv"
items2[grepl("\\.csv$", items2)]
#> [1] "item.csv" "wat.csv"
str_subset(items2, "\\.csv$")
#> [1] "item.csv" "wat.csv"

[njtierney]

good point about the wildcard aspect! I guess I had internalised that it wouldn't be so bad if the wildcard was used, but I can see from your examples that this could be bad indeed!