16 Practical Applications

16.1 Introduction

This chapter is dedicated to show some practical examples that involve handling and processing strings. The main idea is to put in practice all the material covered so far and get a grasp of the variety of things you can do in R.

We will describe a handful of typical examples. While the examples are not exhaustive, but just representative:

• reversing a string
• matching email addresses
• matching html elements (href’s and img’s anchors)
• working with common log format files
• calculating basic statistics and analytics of character data