Fast partial string matching in R

Question

Given a vector of strings texts and a vector of patterns patterns, I want to find any matching pattern for each text.

For small datasets, t

Answer 1

Use stringi package - it's even faster than grepl. Check the benchmarks! I used text from @Martin-Morgan post

require(stringi)
require(microbenchmark)

text = readLines("~/Desktop/pg100.txt")
pattern <-  strsplit("all the world's a stage and all the people players", " ")[[1]]

grepl_fun <- function(){
    lapply(pattern, grepl, text, fixed=TRUE)
}

stri_fixed_fun <- function(){
    lapply(pattern, function(x) stri_detect_fixed(text,x,NA))
}

#        microbenchmark(grepl_fun(), stri_fixed_fun())
#    Unit: milliseconds
#                 expr      min       lq   median       uq      max neval
#          grepl_fun() 432.9336 435.9666 446.2303 453.9374 517.1509   100
#     stri_fixed_fun() 213.2911 218.1606 227.6688 232.9325 285.9913   100

# if you don't believe me that the results are equal, you can check :)
xx <- grepl_fun()
stri <- stri_fixed_fun()

for(i in seq_along(xx)){
    print(all(xx[[i]] == stri[[i]]))
}