order_substr: Order substrings of a character vector
In coletl/coler: Convenience functions and personal templates

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Note Examples

Split a character vector, reorder the substrings, and paste back together.

order_substr(
  x,
  split = "\\s*,\\s*|\\s*/\\s*|\\s*-\\s*|\\s+",
  perl = TRUE,
  collapse = " ",
  reverse = FALSE
)

`x`	a character vector.
`split`	a regular expressin by which to split. See Details.
`perl`	logical, whether to interpret `split` as a Perl-style regular expression.
`collapse`	a character string with which to collapse the re-ordered sub-strings.
`reverse`	logical, whether to reverse the ordering.

By default, order_substr() splits each string of a character vector at any commas, forward slashes, hyphens, and whitespace, regardless of whether these characters are surrounded by whitespace.

Alternative regular expressions for splitting can be used via split. Other strings may be used to separate the alphabetized output via collapse.

A character vector with substrings ordered alphabetically and re-collapsed.

Cleaning with order_substr() works poorly when substrings are inconsistently separated by the split pattern. For example, the vector of tuna species below hyphenates yellow-fin but leaves bluefin as a single word. Therefore, with the default split patterns, order_substr() splits yellow-fin prior to alphabetization.

tuna <- c("tuna,skipjack", "tuna  , bluefin", "yellow-fin - tuna", "tuna,   albacore")
order_substr(tuna)

colors <- c("green/red", "yellow / blue", "orange purple")
order_substr(colors, collapse = "-", reverse = TRUE)