This post shows simple R trick for capitalization of names, which may have some delimiter.

Problem

Problem is to apply capitalization to names separated by punctuation mark (“.”). For example, “BABACAR.THIOMBANE” is to converted to “Babacar.Thiombane” as follows.



In this case, str_to_title() function from stringr library is used but results in wrong output as follows.


It’s because each name may contain “.”. It, therefore, should be taken into account.

Useful R functions

The following functions are used for solving the above problem.

• scan(text = “BABACAR.THIOMBANE”, sep = “.”, what = “”)
–> [1] “BABACAR” “THIOMBANE”
• gsub(“[.]”, ” “, “BABACAR.THIOMBANE”)
–> [1] “BABACAR THIOMBANE”
• gsub(” “, “.”, “BABACAR THIOMBANE”)
–> [1] “BABACAR.THIOMBANE”
• paste(c(“BABACAR”, “THIOMBANE”), collapse = “.”)
–> [1] “BABACAR.THIOMBANE”

scan() function is used to read data into vector or list using delimiter. gsub(a,b,x) function replace a with b in x but some system characters are used with “[]” when these character is placed at a. paste() function concatenates strings with delimiter (default is a space).

Using these functions, we can implement the following R code.




We implement two methods. Method 1 use sapply() function for the sequential row-wise operation on all rows which consist of multiple elements in each one entry. Method 2 use gsub() and paste() functions which is simpler than method 1.

From the output below, we can find the right answer.



We may encounter similar or more difficult problems which require complicated and time-consuming data manipulation.

The example above is the tip of the iceberg. R will help us when we use appropriately. \(\blacksquare\)