How to remove certain lines in a text?-CodePudding

data <- "as follows:\n\n          YEAS--231\n\n     Adams\n     Aguilar\n "

I want the line starting with 2 or less blank space, output like this:

"as follows:"

and remove the lines if they start with 3 or more blank spaces.

text <- str_split(data,"\n")

The type of "text is list, is there a way to convert "text" to character? Or any other ways to get my result?

CodePudding user response：

You can split the string on '\n' and with grep return the strings which has less than 3 spaces at the start of the string.

data <- "as follows:\n\n          YEAS--231\n\n     Adams\n     Aguilar\n "
grep('^\\s{3,}', unlist(strsplit(trimws(data), '\n ')), value = TRUE, invert = TRUE)
#[1] "as follows:"

Using stringr functions -

library(stringr)
library(magrittr)

str_split(trimws(data), '\\n ') %>%
  unlist() %>%
  str_subset('^\\s{3,}', negate = TRUE)

CodePudding user response：

This is how to start every new line with two blanks instead on any number of blanks so that the lines are aligned:

library(tidyverse)

data <- "as follows:\n\n          YEAS--231\n\n     Adams\n     Aguilar\n "
cat(data)
#> as follows:
#> 
#>           YEAS--231
#> 
#>      Adams
#>      Aguilar
#> 

data %>%
  str_replace_all("\n[ ] ", "\n  ") %>%
  cat()
#> as follows:
#> 
#>   YEAS--231
#> 
#>   Adams
#>   Aguilar
#>

^{Created on 2021-09-25 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}