Question

I want to test a vector of character strings and determine if each one contains elements that are numeric or symbols (ie I want to know if a string is more than just alpha characters and spaces). I’ve solved it here but am wondering if there’s a more efficient way (in R regex).

x <- c("ff d fdf4f", "fve dvgf", "vfev!", "rcvce rc&")
nchar(gsub("[a-zA-Z]|\\s+", "", x)) > 0

Answer 1

grepl along with looking for characters that don’t meet what you want seems to work

grepl("[^a-zA-Z[:space:]]", x)

This gives the same output as your original code

> x <- c("ff d fdf4f", "fve dvgf", "vfev!", "rcvce rc&")
> nchar(gsub("[a-zA-Z]|\\s+", "", x)) > 0
[1]  TRUE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE
> grepl("[^a-zA-Z[:space:]]", x)
[1]  TRUE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE