Matching partial strings

To allow users to specify plot type (argument type) in the phytools function fancyTree without having to write the string for the desired type out in full, I yesterday wrote a custom function to match partial strings - the internal phytools function matchType. This is what it looked like:

matchType<-function(type,types){
 for(i in 1:length(types))
  if(all(strsplit(type,split="")[[1]]==strsplit(types[i], split="")[[1]][1:length(strsplit(type,split="")[[1]])]))
   type=types[i]
 return(type)
}

The very long if statement basically asks if (when type is split into a character vector with strsplit) all it elements (up to its total length) match all the elements of the current type under evaluation. So, for instance, we can do the following:

> type="extinct"
> matchType(type,c("extinction","traitgram3d","droptip"))
[1] "extinction"
> type="drop"
> matchType(type,c("extinction","traitgram3d","droptip"))
[1] "droptip"

or any number of a virtually infinite number of variations thereof.

It did strike me, though, that there might be a pre-existing R function to do this - and sure enough, there is: pmatch in the base package. It is slightly different from matchType in that it returns the index of the (partially) matching strings, but it is otherwise pretty much identical. To use it as a substitute for matchType, we would just have to do the following:

> types=c("extinction","traitgram3d","droptip")
> type="extinct"
> types[pmatch(type,types)]
[1] "extinction"
> type="drop"
> types[pmatch(type,types)]
[1] "droptip"

Sigh - oh well!