Case-insensitive search of a list in R

Question

Can I search a character list for a string where I don\'t know how the string is cased? Or more generally, I\'m trying to reference a column in a dataframe, but I don\'t kn

Answer 1

With the stringr package, you can modify the pattern with one of the built in modifier functions (see `?modifiers). For example since we are matching a fixed string (no special regular expression characters) but want to ignore case, we can do

str_detect(colnames(iris), fixed("species", ignore_case=TRUE))

Or you can use the (?i) case insensitive modifier

str_detect(colnames(iris), "(?i)species")