Regular expressions in R in R Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Regular Expressions in R

📖 Scenario: You work in a small library. You have a list of book titles mixed with some extra text. You want to find which titles mention the word "data" in any form.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple R program that uses regular expressions to find and print book titles containing the word "data".

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a character vector called books with given titles

Create a regular expression pattern variable called pattern

Use grep() with pattern on books to find matching titles

Print the matching titles using print()

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Libraries, bookstores, or data analysts often need to search text data for keywords quickly and accurately.

💼 Career

Knowing regular expressions and text search functions in R is useful for data cleaning, text mining, and report generation.

1

Create the book titles vector

Create a character vector called books with these exact entries: "Data Science Basics", "Introduction to R", "Advanced Data Analysis", "Cooking Recipes", "Big Data Trends"

R Programming

# Create the character vector books with the given titles
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the c() function to create a vector of strings.

2

Create the regular expression pattern

Create a variable called pattern and set it to the regular expression string "data" to match the word "data" in any case.

R Programming

books <- c("Data Science Basics", "Introduction to R", "Advanced Data Analysis", "Cooking Recipes", "Big Data Trends")
# Create the pattern variable with the string "data"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the string "data" to the variable pattern.

3

Find titles matching the pattern

Use grep() with pattern on books to find indices of titles containing "data" ignoring case. Store the result in a variable called matches.

R Programming

books <- c("Data Science Basics", "Introduction to R", "Advanced Data Analysis", "Cooking Recipes", "Big Data Trends")
pattern <- "data"
# Use grep() with ignore.case=TRUE to find matching titles
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use grep(pattern, books, ignore.case = TRUE) to find matches ignoring case.

4

Print the matching book titles

Use print() to display the titles from books at the positions stored in matches.

R Programming

books <- c("Data Science Basics", "Introduction to R", "Advanced Data Analysis", "Cooking Recipes", "Big Data Trends")
pattern <- "data"
matches <- grep(pattern, books, ignore.case = TRUE)
# Print the matching titles
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(books[matches]) to show the matching titles.