translate function

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.

Returns

an object like text but with characters translated

See Also

grep

Examples

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