stringx: Replacements for base R string functions powered by stringi

English is the native language for only 5% of the World population. Also, only 17% of us can understand this text. Moreover, the Latin alphabet is the main one for merely 36% of the total. The early computer era, now a very long time ago, was dominated by the US. Due to the proliferation of the internet, smartphones, social media, and other technologies and communication platforms, this is no longer the case. This package replaces base R string functions with ones that fully support the Unicode standards related to natural language and date-time processing. Thanks to ICU (International Components for Unicode) and stringi, they are fast, reliable, and portable across different platforms.

R’s ambitions go far beyond being merely the “free software environment for statistical computing and graphics”. It has proven effective in developing whole data analysis pipelines: from gathering information through the discovery of knowledge to the communication of results.

Modern data science is no longer just about number crunching. Text is a rich source of new knowledge — from natural language processing to bioinformatics. It also gives powerful means to represent or transfer unstructured data.

Note

To learn more about R, check out Marek’s open-access (free!) textbook Deep R Programming.

stringx brings R string processing abilities to the 21st century. It replaces functions like paste, grep, tolower, strptime, and sprintf with ones that:

  • support a wide range of languages and scripts and fully conform to Unicode standards (see also this video),

  • work in the same way on every platform,

  • fix some long-standing inconsistencies in the base R functions (related to vectorisation, handling of missing values, preservation of attributes, order of arguments, interoperability with other procedures, etc.; they are all thoroughly documented in this online manual, happy reading! 🤓),

  • are more forward-pipe (|> or magrittr::%>%) operator-friendly.

Also, a few new, useful operations are introduced.

install.packages("stringx")  # install from CRAN
suppressMessages(library("stringx"))

c("ACTGCT", "42", "stringx \U0001f970") |> grepv2("\\p{EMOJI_PRESENTATION}")
## [1] "stringx 🥰"

toupper("gro\u00DF")  # replaces base::toupper()
## [1] "GROSS"

l <- c("e", "e\u00b2", "\u03c0", "\u03c0\u00b2", "\U0001f602\U0001f603")
r <- c(exp(1), exp(2), pi, pi^2, NaN)
cat(sprintf("%8s=%+.3f", l, r), sep="\n")  # replaces base::sprintf()
##        e=+2.718
##       e²=+7.389
##        π=+3.142
##       π²=+9.870
##     😂😃= NaN

stringx is a set of wrappers around stringi — a mature R package for fast, consistent, convenient, and portable string/text/natural language processing in any locale that relies on ICU – International Components for Unicode.

stringx’s source code is hosted on GitHub. Its official releases are available on CRAN. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, either Version 2 or Version 3; see license.