Handling and Processing Strings in R by Gaston Sanchez. (free ebook)
From the post:
Many years ago I decided to apply for a job in a company that developed data mining applications for big retailers. I was invited for an on-site visit and I went through the typical series of interviews with the members of the analytics team. Everything was going smoothly and I was enjoying all the conversations. Then it came turn to meet the computer scientist. After briefly describing his role in the team he started asking me a bunch of technical questions and tests. Although I was able to answer those questions related with statistics and multivariate analysis, I had a really hard time trying to answer a series of questions related with string manipulations.
I will remember my interview with that guy as one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. That day, the first thing I did when I went back home was to open my laptop, launch R, and start reproducing the tests I failed to solve. It didn’t take me that much to get the right answers. Unfortunately, it was too late and the harm was already done. Needless to say I wasn’t offered the job. That shocking experience showed me that I was not prepared for manipulating character strings. I felt so bad that I promised myself to learn the basics of strings manipulation and text processing. “Handling and Processing Strings in R” is one of the derived results of that old promise.
The content of this ebook is the byproduct of my experience working with character string data in R. It is based on my notes, scripts, projects, and uncountable days and nights in which I’ve been struggling with text data. Briefly, I’ve tried to document and organize several topics related with manipulating character strings.
At one hundred and twelve (112) pages, “Handling and Processing Strings in R” may not answer every question you have about strings and R, but it answers a lot of them.
Enjoy and pass this along!
I first saw this in a tweet by Sharon Machlis.