Writing an Ifelese Command to Detect Whether a Word Appears in a Dataframe in R [duplicate]

Question

I want to create a data frame column based on whether a specific dictionary of terms appears within text data.

I currently have a data frame, where the column text contains different texts. I would like to create a new variable within that data frame which detects whether the words in my dictionary appear in any given text (to be coded as 1), or if the words in my dictionary do not appear in any given text (coded as 0).

I already created an animals_dict dictionary with three terms: "cat, "dog", and "fish". The code I have so far creates a new column in my data frame, but all values appear as 0.

data_zoo <- mutate(data_zoo, animals = if_else(text=="animals_dict", 1, 0)) 

I believe the issue is that this code is detecting whether the rows in my text column appear as "animals_dict", vs. detecting whether the words in my animals dictionary appear in that text at all.

Answer 1

You can use str_detect to return a logical like this

library(stringr)
library(dplyr)


animals_to_keep = c("cat", "fish", "dog")

examp_data = data.frame(creatures = c("cat", "fish",
 "dog", "elephant", "shark", "whale"))

examp_data |> 
  mutate(animals = if_else(str_detect(creatures, paste(animals_to_keep, collapse = "|")), 1,0))
#>   creatures animals
#> 1       cat       1
#> 2      fish       1
#> 3       dog       1
#> 4  elephant       0
#> 5     shark       0
#> 6     whale       0

^{Created on 2024-07-03 with reprex v2.1.0}