mutate with case_when and contains

Question

I feel like there should be an efficient way to mutate new columns with dplyr using case_when and contains, but cannot get it to work.

I understand using case_when within mutate is "somewhat experimental" (as in this post), but would be grateful for any suggestions.

Doesn't work:

library(tidyverse)

set.seed(1234)

x <- c("Black", "Blue", "Green", "Red")

df <- data.frame(a = 1:20, 
                 b = sample(x,20, replace=TRUE))

df <- df %>%
  mutate(group = case_when(.$b(contains("Bl")) ~ "Group1",
                 case_when(.$b(contains("re", ignore.case=TRUE)) ~ "Group2")
  )

I believe contains is only to be used inside select. At least, that's what I gather from the documentation of ?contains. — Rich Scriven
Thanks - yes I thought that might be true, but wasn't sure from the documentation. Seems like might be useful within mutate too, although the grep solution below is a good alternative. — Peter MacPherson

akrun akrun · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-29T13:27:49

We can use grep

df %>%  
   mutate(group = case_when(grepl("Bl", b) ~ "Group1",
                            grepl("re", b, ignore.case = TRUE) ~"Group2"))
#    a     b  group
#1   1 Black Group1
#2   2 Green Group2
#3   3 Green Group2
#4   4 Green Group2
#5   5   Red Group2
#6   6 Green Group2
#7   7 Black Group1
#8   8 Black Group1
#9   9 Green Group2
#10 10 Green Group2
#11  1 Green Group2
#12  2 Green Group2
#13  3  Blue Group1
#14  4   Red Group2
#15  5  Blue Group1
#16  6   Red Group2
#17  7  Blue Group1
#18  8  Blue Group1
#19  9 Black Group1
#20 10 Black Group1

mutate with case_when and contains

2 Answers