matching sub-vectors?

[amit gal]

so R has a great function, match, to find values in vectors (also %in% to test the existence). but what if I want to find a short vector in a big vector? that is, to test if a given vector is contained (in order!) in another vector? what if I want to find whether a given vector is a prefix/suffix of another vector? are there such functions in R?

example of what I would like:

x=c(1,3,4)
y=c(4,1,3,4,5)
z=c(3,1)

v_contains(x,y)  # return TRUE x is contained in y
v_contains(z,y)  # FALSE the values of z are in y, but not in the right order
v_match(x,y)     # returns 2 because x appears in y starting at position 2

is there anything like it? how would you approach it efficiently?

[Michael Dorman]

If the vectors are always composed of single-digit numbers then I would use paste0(x, collapse = "") on both vectors and then gsub. This approach is also applicable with longer numbers if we add leading zeros before using paste0, but perhaps will be less efficient. Otherwise would look for a C/C++ function and use it with Rcpp. 

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[amit gal]

the string method is not applicable in my case due to efficiency.

However after some thought, I did exploit another property of my vectors - in each vector values do not repeat

so for x to be fully contained in y

match(x,y) must be a series of consecutive numbers

so

all(diff(match(x,y))==1)

does what I need.

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[Michael Dorman]

Good idea!