Making gsub only replace entire words?

Question

(I\'m using R.) For a list of words that\'s called \"goodwords.corpus\", I am looping through the documents in a corpus, and replacing each of the words on the list \"goodwo

Answer 1

Use \b to indicate a word boundary:

> text <- "good night goodnight"
> gsub("\\bgood\\b", paste("good", 1234), text)
[1] "good 1234 night goodnight"

In your loop, something like this:

for (word in goodwords.corpus){
  patt <- paste0('\\b', word, '\\b')
  repl <- paste(word, "1234")

  test <-gsub(patt, repl, test)
}