Question

Let’s imagine you have a string:

strLine <- "The transactions (on your account) were as follows: 0 3,000 (500) 0 2.25 (1,200)"

Is there a function that strips out the numbers into an array/vector producing the following required solution:

result <- c(0, 3000, -500, 0, 2.25, -1200)?

i.e.

result[3] = -500

Notice, the numbers are presented in accounting form so negative numbers appear between (). Also, you can assume that only numbers appear to the right of the first occurance of a number. I am not that good with regexp so would appreciate it if you could help if this would be required. Also, I don’t want to assume the string is always the same so I am looking to strip out all words (and any special characters) before the location of the first number.

Answer 1

library(stringr)
x <- str_extract_all(strLine,"\\(?[0-9,.]+\\)?")[[1]]
> x
[1] "0"       "3,000"   "(500)"   "0"       "2.25"    "(1,200)"

Change the parens to negatives:

x <- gsub("\\((.+)\\)","-\\1",x)
x
[1] "0"      "3,000"  "-500"   "0"      "2.25"   "-1,200"

And then as.numeric() or taRifx::destring to finish up (the next version of destring will support negatives by default so the keep option won’t be necessary):

library(taRifx)
destring( x, keep="0-9.-")
[1]    0 3000  -500    0    2.25 -1200

OR:

as.numeric(gsub(",","",x))
[1]     0  3000  -500     0     2.25 -1200