str_locate: Find location of match

In stringr: Simple, Consistent Wrappers for Common String Operations

Find location of match

Description

str_locate() returns the start and end position of the first match; str_locate_all() returns the start and end position of each match.

Because the start and end values are inclusive, zero-length matches (e.g. $, ^, ⁠\\b⁠) will have an end that is smaller than start.

Usage

str_locate(string, pattern)

str_locate_all(string, pattern)

Arguments

string

Input vector. Either a character vector, or something coercible to one.

pattern

Pattern to look for. The default interpretation is a regular expression, as described in vignette("regular-expressions"). Use regex() for finer control of the matching behaviour. Match a fixed string (i.e. by comparing only bytes), using fixed(). This is fast, but approximate. Generally, for matching human text, you'll want coll() which respects character matching rules for the specified locale. Match character, word, line and sentence boundaries with boundary(). An empty pattern, "", is equivalent to boundary("character").

Value

• str_locate() returns an integer matrix with two columns and one row for each element of string. The first column, start, gives the position at the start of the match, and the second column, end, gives the position of the end.

• str_locate_all() returns a list of integer matrices with the same length as string/pattern. The matrices have columns start and end as above, and one row for each match.

See Also

str_extract() for a convenient way of extracting matches, stringi::stri_locate() for the underlying implementation.

Examples

fruit <- c("apple", "banana", "pear", "pineapple")
str_locate(fruit, "$")
str_locate(fruit, "a")
str_locate(fruit, "e")
str_locate(fruit, c("a", "b", "p", "p"))

str_locate_all(fruit, "a")
str_locate_all(fruit, "e")
str_locate_all(fruit, c("a", "b", "p", "p"))

# Find location of every character
str_locate_all(fruit, "")

stringr documentation built on Sept. 9, 2025, 5:50 p.m.