Extracting multiple chunks of string between patterns

This post asks how to extract a string between other two strings in R: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39086400/extracting-a-string-between-other-two-strings-in-r

I'm seeking a similar answer, but now covering multiple occurences between patterns.

Example string:

Fabricante:  EMS S/A CNPJ:  - 57.507.378/0001-01  Endereço:  SAO BERNARDO DO CAMPO - SP - BRASIL Etapa de Fabricaçao: Fabricante:  EMS S/A CNPJ:  - 57.507.378/0003-65  Endereço:  HORTOLANDIA - SP - BRASIL Etapa de Fabricaçao: Fabricante:  NOVAMED FABRICAÇAO DE PRODUTOS FARMACEUTICOS LTDA CNPJ:  - 12.424.020/0001-79  Endereço:  MANAUS - AM - BRASIL Etapa de Fabricaçao:

Between each occurrence of the words "Fabricante" and "CNPJ", there is a company name, which I would like to extract. In this string, there are three such companies: "EMS S/A", "EMS S/A", and "NOVAMED FABRICAÇAO DE PRODUTOS FARMACEUTICOS".

Based on the post above, this code

gsub(".*Fabricante: *(.+) CNPJ:.*", "\", df$manufacturing_location[92])

returns the last occurrence, "NOVAMED FABRICAÇAO DE PRODUTOS FARMACEUTICOS".

When I change to

gsub(".*Fabricante: *(.*?) CNPJ:.*", "\", df$manufacturing_location[92])

it returns the first. I tried changing to \\2 as I thought this would number occurences, but then I get an empty string. I also tried using stringr's str_match_all, but it did not work too.

Anyone knows how to adjust the syntax so I can taylor the code to return each of the three as needed?

I would like to put this into a mutate syntax where I can pass this onto a dataset with many such strings, and return the first, second, and third entries as variables. For this, I have found I cannot make str_match_all work.

We can use str_match_all as follows:

<!-- language: r -->

x <- "Fabricante:  EMS S/A CNPJ:  - 57.507.378/0001-01  Endereço:  SAO BERNARDO DO CAMPO - SP - BRASIL Etapa de Fabricaçao: Fabricante:  EMS S/A CNPJ:  - 57.507.378/0003-65  Endereço:  HORTOLANDIA - SP - BRASIL Etapa de Fabricaçao: Fabricante:  NOVAMED FABRICAÇAO DE PRODUTOS FARMACEUTICOS LTDA CNPJ:  - 12.424.020/0001-79  Endereço:  MANAUS - AM - BRASIL Etapa de Fabricaçao:"
matches <- str_match_all(x, "(?<=\\bFabricante:  ).*?(?= CNPJ:)")[[1]]
matches

     [,1]                                                    
[1,] "EMS S/A"                                               
[2,] "EMS S/A"                                               
[3,] "NOVAMED FABRICA<U+00C7>AO DE PRODUTOS FARMACEUTICOS LTDA"

Here is an explanation of the regex pattern being used:

• (?<=\\bFabricante: ) lookbehind and assert that Fabricante: precedes
• .*? then match all content until reaching the nearest
• (?= CNPJ:) lookahead and assert that CNPJ: follows

You could strsplit at the key words and subset to desired elements.

el(strsplit(x, '\\s?\\w*:\\s+'))[c(2, 6, 10)]
# [1] "EMS S/A"                                           "EMS S/A"                                          
# [3] "NOVAMED FABRICAÇAO DE PRODUTOS FARMACEUTICOS LTDA"

It seems that your data is of a debian control file format. You could use read.dcf in base R after adding line breaks to it. Then you can access any column of the data that you want.

read.dcf(textConnection(gsub("(Fabricante)","\n\",gsub(" (\\S+:)", "\n\", x))),all = TRUE)
                                         Fabricante                 CNPJ                                     Endereço Fabricaçao
1                                           EMS S/A - 57.507.378/0001-01 SAO BERNARDO DO CAMPO - SP - BRASIL Etapa de           
2                                           EMS S/A - 57.507.378/0003-65           HORTOLANDIA - SP - BRASIL Etapa de           
3 NOVAMED FABRICAÇAO DE PRODUTOS FARMACEUTICOS LTDA - 12.424.020/0001-79                MANAUS - AM - BRASIL Etapa de 

--- breakdown:

gsub(" *(\\S+:)", "\n\", x) |> #Every keyword needs to start a new line 
  gsub("(Fabricante)", "\n\", x=_) |> #Every row data separated from the previous
  textConnection() |> #  Convert to a file readable object
  read.dcf(all =TRUE) # Read into R