Use grepl to search either of multiple substrings in a text
I am using grepl() in R to search if either of the following genres exist in my text. I am doing it like this right now:
grepl("Action", my_text) |
grepl("Adventure", my_text) |
grepl("Animation", my_text) |
grepl("Biography", my_text) |
grepl("Comedy", my_text) |
grepl("Crime", my_text) |
grepl("Documentary", my_text) |
grepl("Drama", my_text) |
grepl("Family", my_text) |
grepl("Fantasy", my_text) |
grepl("Film-Noir", my_text) |
grepl("History", my_text) |
grepl("Horror", my_text) |
grepl("Music", my_text) |
grepl("Musical", my_text) |
grepl("Mystery", my_text) |
grepl("Romance", my_text) |
grepl("Sci-Fi", my_text) |
grepl("Sport", my_text) |
grepl("Thriller", my_text) |
grepl("War", my_text) |
grepl("Western", my_text)
Is there a better way to write this code? Can I put all the genres in an array and then somehow use grepl() on that?
Answer
You could paste the genres together with an "or" | separator and run that through grepl as a single regular expression.
x <- c("Action", "Adventure", "Animation", ...)
grepl(paste(x, collapse = "|"), my_text)
Here's an example.
x <- c("Action", "Adventure", "Animation")
my_text <- c("This one has Animation.", "This has none.", "Here is Adventure.")
grepl(paste(x, collapse = "|"), my_text)
# [1] TRUE FALSE TRUE