Convenience function for calling grep.
Intended for use in i in [.data.table, i.e., for subsetting/filtering.
Syntax should be familiar to SQL users, with interpretation as regex.
like(vector, pattern, ignore.case = FALSE, fixed = FALSE) vector %like% pattern vector %ilike% pattern vector %flike% pattern
vector |
Either a |
pattern |
Pattern to be matched |
ignore.case |
|
fixed |
|
Internally, like is essentially a wrapper around base::grepl, except that it is smarter about handling factor input (base::grep uses slow as.character conversion).
Logical vector, TRUE for items that match pattern.
Current implementation does not make use of sorted keys.
DT = data.table(Name=c("Mary","George","Martha"), Salary=c(2,3,4))
DT[Name %like% "^Mar"]
DT[Name %ilike% "mar"]
DT[Name %flike% "Mar"]Please choose more modern alternatives, such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.