Filter rows containing a certain string in R

Problem

We want to filter rows containing a certain string in R. In our example, rows containing the string 'foo'.

foo <- data.frame(Company = c("company1", "foo", "test", "food"), Metric = rnorm(4, 10))

   Company    Metric
1 company1  7.590178
2      foo  9.711493
3     test 10.862799
4     food  9.337434

Solution

dplyr

Using the grepl function inside filter.

library(dplyr)
filter(foo, grepl("foo", Company))

  Company   Metric
1     foo 9.711493
2    food 9.337434

data.table

Another options is the function like from data.table with a similar syntax to SQL.

library(data.table)
DT <- data.table(foo)
DT[Company %like% 'foo']

   Company   Metric
1:     foo 9.711493
2:    food 9.337434

References

• stackoverflow