From 899c1dce8592bca9286a17517edcdb5cb0f14223 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Hadley Wickham Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2022 12:47:28 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] Clarify why separate_wider_* live in tidyr --- regexps.qmd | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/regexps.qmd b/regexps.qmd index 075481e73..fab619c23 100644 --- a/regexps.qmd +++ b/regexps.qmd @@ -247,8 +247,8 @@ These functions are naturally paired with `mutate()` when doing data cleaning., ### Extract variables -The last function we'll discuss comes from tidyr: `separate_wider_regex()`. -It works like the `separate_wider_location()` and `separate_wider_delim()` functions that you learned about in @sec-string-columns but takes a vector of regular expressions rather than a vector of widths or a delimiter. +The last function we'll discuss uses regular expressions to extract data out of one column into one or more new columns: `separate_wider_regex()`. +It's a peer of the `separate_wider_location()` and `separate_wider_delim()` functions that you learned about in @sec-string-columns. These functions live in tidyr because the operates on (columns of) data frames, rather than individual vectors. Let's create a simple dataset to show how it works. Here we have some data derived from `babynames` where we have the name, gender, and age of a bunch of people in a rather weird format[^regexps-5]: