Translate Vector or Matrix of Text Strings

Uses the UNIX tr command to translate any character in old in text to the corresponding character in new. If multichar=T or old and new have more than one element, or each have one element but they have different numbers of characters, uses the UNIX sed command to translate the series of characters in old to the series in new when these characters occur in text. If old or new contain a backslash, you sometimes have to quadruple it to make the UNIX command work. If they contain a forward slash, preceed it by two backslashes. Invokes the builtin chartr function if multichar=FALSE.

translate(text, old, new, multichar=FALSE)

Arguments

text

scalar, vector, or matrix of character strings to translate.

old

vector old characters

new

corresponding vector of new characters

multichar

See above.

Value

an object like text but with characters translated

See also

grep

Examples

translate(c("ABC","DEF"),"ABCDEFG", "abcdefg")
#> [1] "abc" "def"
translate("23.12","[.]","\\cdot ") # change . to \cdot
#> [1] "23\004ot 12"
translate(c("dog","cat","tiger"),c("dog","cat"),c("DOG","CAT"))
#> [1] "DOG"   "CAT"   "tiger"
# S-Plus gives  [1] "DOG"   "CAT"   "tiger" - check discrepency
translate(c("dog","cat2","snake"),c("dog","cat"),"animal")
#> [1] "animal"  "animal2" "snake"  
# S-Plus gives  [1] "animal"  "animal2" "snake"