Detect substring within a string while not considering part of the substring-CodePudding

I'm trying to check whether string B is contained by string A and this is what I tried:

library(stringr)
string_a <- "something else free/1a2b a bird yes"
string_b <- "free/xxxx a bird"
str_detect(string_a, string_b)

I would expect a match (TRUE) since I wouldn't like to consider part of string_b followed by the "/" and before a white space, which is why I put "/xxxx".

In a way the "/xxxx" should represent match any string or number possible in these places. Is there maybe another notation to ignore parts of string when matching like this?

CodePudding user response：

Yes, in regex you can use .* to match zero or more characters.

library(stringr)
string_a <- "something else free/1a2b a bird yes"
string_b <- "free/xxxx a bird"
string_c <- "free/.*a bird"

str_detect(string_a, string_c)
#[1] TRUE

If you cannot change string_b at source, you may use str_replace_all or gsub to replace xxxx with '.*'.

str_detect(string_a, str_replace_all(string_b, 'x ', '.*'))
#[1] TRUE