regex - Can I use an OR statement to indicate the pattern in stringr's str_extract_all function?

Question

I'm looking at a number of cells in a data frame and am trying to extract any one of several sequences of characters; there's only?one of these sequences per per cell.

Here's what I mean:

dF$newColumn = str_extract_all(string = "dF$column1", pattern ="sequence_1|sequence_2")

Am I screwing the syntax up here? Can I pull this sort of thing with stringr? Please rectify my ignorance!

Answer 1

Yes, you can use | since it denotes logical or in regex. Here's an example:

vec <- c("abc text", "text abc", "def text", "text def text")
library(stringr)
str_extract_all(string = vec, pattern = "abc|def")

The result:

[[1]]
[1] "abc"

[[2]]
[1] "abc"

[[3]]
[1] "def"

[[4]]
[1] "def"

However, in your command, you should replace "dF$column1" with dF$column1 (without quotes).