[BUGZILLA #14822] match() analogue for regexes, eg firstgrep() or match( , regex=TRUE)

[MichaelChirico]

It would be a great speeder-upper to have something like grep() that only returns the first match (if there is one). If it could work like match() and take a vector of regexes as its pattern argument, and return the first-matching-position for each, that'd be even nicer. The point is to avoid wasting cycles when only the first match is required.

R's regex and text-manipulation facilities are very good these days; eg I find it very useful for automatically manipulating low-level programming code. Often I only need the first line that greps to some pattern, but grep() etc look thru the entire object.

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METADATA

• Bug author - Mark Bravington
• Creation time - 2012-02-22 02:37:57 UTC
• Bugzilla link
• Status - NEW
• Alias - None
• Component - Wishlist
• Version - R 2.13.2
• Hardware - All All
• Importance - P5 enhancement
• Assignee - R-core
• URL -

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METADATA

• Comment author - elin.waring
• Timestamp - 2020-08-08 13:55:46 UTC

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METADATA

• Comment author - Mark Bravington
• Timestamp - 2020-08-10 00:18:57 UTC

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METADATA

• Comment author - elin.waring
• Timestamp - 2020-08-14 18:35:49 UTC

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METADATA

• Comment author - Mark Bravington
• Timestamp - 2020-08-15 01:36:59 UTC