Dictionary function for R

Question

I'm new to R and have created a dictionary function. A user will input a phrase into a text field and the server will read it and see if there's a match in a back-end data table and if so, output the abbreviation of the phrase.

This dictionary data table does not have a 1 to 1 mapping. The dictionary has logical_word and abbreviation columns; here's a small sample:

238 abstract  ABST  NA  NA  NA
239 abstraction ABSTN NA  NA  NA
383 aggregate consumer economic ACE NA  NA  NA
876 business-to-consumer  B2C NA  NA  NA
1309  consumer  CNSMR NA  NA  NA
1310  Consumer Credit Counseling Service  CCCS  NA  NA  NA
1311  Consumer Indebtedness Index CII NA  NA  NA
1312  Consumer Lending  CNL NA  NA  NA
1313  consumer loan application CLAPP NA  NA  NA
1314  consumer operating as business  CSOAB NA  NA  NA
1315  Consumer Price Index
5582  time zone TZN NA  NA  NA
6041  Wholesale Consumer Information System WCIS  NA  NA  NA
6119  zone  ZONE  NA  NA  NA
6121  ZORRO ZR  NA  NA  NA

Suppose a user inputs "Consumer Credit Counseling Service zorro zone". This program will take the input and switch it to upper case and same w/dictionary DT.

I split the user input on whitespace into a vector, then run a loop and grep for the first word (CONSUMER) to see if there's a match in the dictionary. If there is a match, then I keep going and grep for 2 words (CONSUMER CREDIT). I do the same for all words until there's no match returned from the grep or if the match returned is == 1; in that case I pull the abbreviation value using merge() and the phrase (searchStringDT[i]).

When looking for "CONSUMER CREDIT COUNSELING SERVICE ZORRO" the search result comes back as empty, so then I run a merge() on the last iterated phrase "CONSUMER CREDIT COUNSELING SERVICE" and the dictionary and get back the abbreviation "CCCS".

Then I set a flag (reset <- true) and run the loop against "ZORRO" and see if there's a match; since there is, I keep going and grep "ZORRO ZONE" again. There's no value returned and I run a merge() on "ZORRO" and the dictionary and get back "ZR".

Then I run the loop on "ZONE", and since it's the last value, I run the merge() and get back "ZONE".

I have a couple of questions:

1. Can someone recommend different approaches to improve speed/accuracy and make my code cleaner? Right now, it seems like a mess IMO.

   If not, can someone recommend a way to fix my current approach, since this doesn't completely work.

2. In the grep I added "^" to make sure that I only return values that start with the user input, but when I tested with "abstract" the grep returned both "abstract" and "abstraction" since the patterns match. My logic is based on only 1 value being returned to pull the abbreviation using the merge().

   If I add "$" to the grep then my code breaks since "CONSUMER CREDIT" doesn't have an exact match. Is there some other condition I can add to see if the dictionary contains a phrase? So if I search "CONSUMER CREDIT" I should get back "CONSUMER CREDIT COUNSELING SERVICE" and if I search "ABSTRACT" I should only get "ABSTRACT" and not "ABSTRACTION"?

The code:

    searchDictionary <- function(userInput=NULL,dictionary=NULL){

      userInput <- data.table(logical_word=userInput)

      listTest <- data.frame(matrix(ncol = 5, nrow = nrow(userInput)))
      names(listTest) <- c("logical_word","abbreviation","V3","V4","V5")

      searchString <- ""
      reset <- "FALSE"
      searchStringDT <- data.table(matrix(ncol = 1, nrow = nrow(userInput)))
      names(searchStringDT) <- c("logical_word")

      i <- 1
      while(i <= nrow(userInput)){

        if(i==1){
          searchString <- userInput[i]
          searchStringDT$logical_word[i] <- unlist(searchString)
        }
        else if(reset == "TRUE"){
          searchString <- userInput[i]
          searchStringDT$logical_word[i] <- unlist(searchString)
        }
        else{
          searchString <- paste(searchString,userInput[i])
          searchStringDT$logical_word[i] <- unlist(searchString)
        }
        reset <- "FALSE"

        searchResult <- dictionary[grep( paste0("^",searchStringDT[i]), dictionary$logical_word), ]

        if(nrow(searchResult) == 0){
            if( grepl("\\s", searchStringDT[i]) ){ 
              listTest[i-1,] <- merge(searchStringDT[i-1], dictionary, "logical_word", all.x = TRUE, sort = FALSE)
              i <- i
            } 
            else{
              listTest[i,] <- searchStringDT[i]
              i <- i+1
            }
            reset <- "TRUE"
        }
        else if(nrow(searchResult) == 1){
          listTest[i,] <- merge(searchStringDT[i], dictionary, "logical_word", all.x = TRUE, sort = FALSE)
          i <- i+1
        }
        else{
          i <-i+1
        }

      }
      print("out for loop listTest")
      print(listTest)
}
```

Answer 1

R supports Perl-compatible regular expressions, and these support \b, which matches at word boundaries. You can use this to avoid matching abstraction:

grep(paste0("^", word, "\\b"), haystack, perl = TRUE)

Instead of the string literals "TRUE" and "FALSE", you should use the logical literals for the reset variable, just remove the quotes.

The spacing in your code is inconsistent. Have a look at https://style.tidyverse.org/ and either apply these rules manually to your code, or use an automatic formatter. RStudio certainly has one, and since a few days IntelliJ has an R plugin with a good formatter.

Instead of printing the result at the end of the function, you should rather just return it by leaving out the print and the parentheses. This makes it easier to write unit tests for it. If you haven't done so already, have a look at the testthat package.

The if branches for i == 1 and for reset == TRUE are the same. You should merge them by making the condition i == 1 || reset (after you removed the quotes, as I suggested above).