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Match regular expressions and variable names.

Source: R/matchValues_varLabels.R
matchValues_varLabels.Rd

Using variable labels, matchValues_varLabels matches a vector of regular expressions to a set of variable names.

Usage

matchValues_varLabels(GADSdat, mc_vars, values, label_by_hand = character(0))

Arguments

GADSdat

A GADSdat object.

mc_vars

A vector containing the names of the variables, which should be matched according to their variable labels.

values

A character vector containing the regular expressions for which the varLabel column should be searched.

label_by_hand

Additional value - mc_var pairs. Necessary, if for some mc_vars no value exists.

Value

Returns a named character vector. Values of the vector are the variable names in the GADSdat, names of the vector are the regular expressions.

Details

Multiple choice items can be stored as multiple dichotomous variables with the information about the variable stored in the variable labels. The function collapseMultiMC_Text can be used to collapse such dichotomous variables and a character variable, but requires a character vector with variables names of the multiple choice variables. matchValues_varLabels creates such a vector based on matching regular expressions (values) to variable labels.

Note that all variables in mc_vars have to be assigned exactly one value (and vice versa). If a variable name is missing in the output, an error will be thrown. In this case, the label_by_hand argument should be used to specify the regular expression variable name pair manually.

Examples

# Prepare example data
mt2 <- data.frame(ID = 1:4, mc1 = c(1, 0, 0, 0), mc2 = c(0, 0, 0, 0), mc3 = c(0, 1, 1, 0),
                  text1 = c(NA, "Eng", "Aus", "Aus2"), text2 = c(NA, "Franz", NA, NA),
                  stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

mt2_gads <- import_DF(mt2)

mt3_gads <- changeVarLabels(mt2_gads, varName = c("mc1", "mc2", "mc3"),
                           varLabel = c("Lang: Eng", "Aus spoken", "other"))

out <- matchValues_varLabels(mt3_gads, mc_vars = c("mc1", "mc2", "mc3"),
                            values = c("Aus", "Eng", "Eng"),
                            label_by_hand = c("other" = "mc3"))