Declare a compound character to be a sequence of separate pattern matches

Declares that a whitespace-separated expression consists of multiple patterns, separated by whitespace. This is typically used as a wrapper around pattern to make it explicit that the pattern elements are to be used for matches to multi-word sequences, rather than individual, unordered matches to single words.

phrase(x)

is.phrase(x)

Arguments

x	the sequence, as a character object containing whitespace separating the patterns

Value

phrase returns a specially classed list whose white-spaced elements have been parsed into separate character elements.

is.phrase returns TRUE if the object was created by phrase; FALSE otherwise.

Examples

# make phrases from characters
phrase(c("a b", "c d e", "f"))
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "a" "b"
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "c" "d" "e"
#> 
#> [[3]]
#> [1] "f"
#> 

# from a dictionary
phrase(dictionary(list(catone = c("a b"), cattwo = "c d e", catthree = "f")))
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "a" "b"
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "c" "d" "e"
#> 
#> [[3]]
#> [1] "f"
#> 

# from a collocations object
(coll <- textstat_collocations(tokens("a b c a b d e b d a b")))
#>   collocation count count_nested length   lambda        z
#> 1         a b     3            0      2 3.412247 1.936083
#> 2         b d     2            0      2 3.218876 1.799406
phrase(coll)
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "a" "b"
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "b" "d"
#>