r code removing words containing @

Question

I want to replace all words containing the symbol @ with a specific word. I am used gsub and therefore am applying it to a character vector. The issue that keeps occuring is that when I use:

gsub(".*@.*", "email", data) 

all of the text in that portion of the character vector gets deleted.

There are multiple different emails all with different lengths so I can't set the characters prior and characters after to a specific number.

Any suggestions?

I've done my fair share of reading about regex but everything I tried failed.

Here's an example:

data <- c("This is an example. Here is my email: emailaddress@help.com. Thank you")

data <- gsub(".*@.*", "email", data)

it returns [1] "email"

when I want [1] "This is an example. Here is my email: email. Thank you"

Answer 1

You can use the following..

gsub('\\S+@\\S+', 'email', data)

Explanation:

\S matches any non-whitespace character. So here we match for any non-whitespace character (1 or more times) preceded by @ followed by any non-whitespace character (1 or more times)

Answer 2

To replace strings with an embedded "@" in R, you can use (translaiting @Fabricator's pattern to R)

data <- c("This is an example. Here is my email: emailaddress@help.com")
gsub("[^\\s]*@[^\\s]*", "email", data, perl=T) 
data
# [1] "This is an example. Here is my email: email"