Comparing namedCapture with other R packages for regular expressions

Abstract

Regular expressions are powerful tools for manipulating non-tabular textual data. For many tasks (visualization, machine learning, etc), tables of numbers must be extracted from such data before processing by other R functions. We present the R package namedCapture, which facilitates such tasks by providing a new user-friendly syntax for defining regular expressions in R code. We begin by describing the history of regular expressions and their usage in R. We then describe the new features of the namedCapture package, and provide detailed comparisons with related R packages (rex, stringr, stringi, tidyr, rematch2, re2r).