Detecting substrings with stringr

Remember that in if statements there are a couple of different things we can use to decide whether to execute the code in the statement or not
We can use conditional statements

if (height > 5) {
  
}

But we can also use functions that return boolean values
So if we want to do something when the value of height is null we can use is.na()

if (is.na(height)) {
  
}

We’re going to use a new function that returns TRUE or FALSE in an exercise
That function is from the stringr package that is useful for processing strings

library(stringr)

Its name is str_detect() and it checks if a substring is part of a larger string

str_detect("Halloween is spooky", "scary")

In our exercise we have a SPECIES column
It has a bunch of values that include the word Acacia (a genus), but also species names
We want to do something for all Acacia
Use str_detect()

str_detect(SPECIES, "Acacia")

Notes