Strings in Arkouda

Like NumPy, Arkouda supports arrays of strings, but whereas in NumPy arrays of strings are still ndarray objects, in Arkouda the array of strings is its own class: Strings.

In order to efficiently store strings with a wide range of lengths, Arkouda uses a “segmented array” data structure, comprising:

  • bytes: A uint8 array containing the concatenated bytes of all the strings, separated by null (0) bytes.

  • offsets: A int64 array with the start index of each string

Performance

Because strings are a variable-width data type, and because of the way Arkouda represents strings, operations on strings are considerably slower than operations on numeric data. Use numeric data whenever possible. For example, if your raw data contains string data that could be represented numerically, consider setting up a processing pipeline performs the conversion (and stores the result in HDF5 format) on ingest.

I/O

Arrays of strings can be transferred between the Arkouda client and server using the arkouda.array and Strings.to_ndarray functions (see Data I/O). The former converts a Python list or NumPy ndarray of strings to an Arkouda Strings object, whereas the latter converts an Arkouda Strings object to a NumPy ndarray. As with numeric arrays, if the size of the data exceeds the threshold set by ak.client.maxTransferBytes, the client will raise an exception.

Arkouda currently only supports the HDF5 file format for disk-based I/O. In order to read an array of strings from an HDF5 file, the strings must be stored in an HDF5 group containing two datasets: segments (an integer array corresponding to offsets above) and values (a uint8 array corresponding to bytes above). See Supported File Formats for more information and guidelines.

Iteration

Iterating directly over a Strings with for x in string is not supported to discourage transferring all the Strings object’s data from the arkouda server to the Python client since there is almost always a more array-oriented way to express an iterator-based computation. To force this transfer, use the to_ndarray function to return the Strings as a numpy.ndarray. See I/O for more details about using to_ndarray with Strings

#.. autofunction:: arkouda.numpy.Strings.to_ndarray

Operations

Arkouda Strings objects support the following operations:

String-Specific Methods

Splitting and joining

Flattening

Given an array of strings where each string encodes a variable-length sequence delimited by a common substring, flattening offers a method for unpacking the sequences into a flat array of individual elements. A mapping between original strings and new array elements can be preserved, if desired. This method can be used in pipe

Regular Expressions

Strings implements behavior similar to the re python library applied to every element. This functionality is based on Chapel’s regex module which is built on google’s re2. re2 sacrifices some functionality (notably lookahead/lookbehind) in exchange for guarantees that searches complete in linear time and in a fixed amount of stack space

Match Object

search, match, and fullmatch return a Match object which supports the following methods

Match.matched()[source]

Return a boolean array indiciating whether each element matched.

Returns:

True for elements that match, False otherwise

Return type:

pdarray

Examples

>>> import arkouda as ak
>>> strings = ak.array(['1_2___', '____', '3', '__4___5____6___7', ''])
>>> strings.search('_+').matched()
array([True True False True False])
Match.start()[source]

Return the starts of matches.

Returns:

The start positions of matches

Return type:

pdarray

Examples

>>> import arkouda as ak
>>> strings = ak.array(['1_2___', '____', '3', '__4___5____6___7', ''])
>>> strings.search('_+').start()
array([1 0 0])
Match.end()[source]

Return the ends of matches.

Returns:

The end positions of matches

Return type:

pdarray

Examples

>>> import arkouda as ak
>>> strings = ak.array(['1_2___', '____', '3', '__4___5____6___7', ''])
>>> strings.search('_+').end()
array([2 4 2])
Match.match_type()[source]

Return the type of the Match object.

Returns:

MatchType of the Match object

Return type:

str

Examples

>>> import arkouda as ak
>>> strings = ak.array(['1_2___', '____', '3', '__4___5____6___7', ''])
>>> strings.search('_+').match_type()
'SEARCH'
Match.find_matches(return_match_origins=False)[source]

Return all matches as a new Strings object.

Parameters:

return_match_origins (bool) – If True, return a pdarray containing the index of the original string each pattern match is from

Returns:

  • Strings – Strings object containing only matches

  • pdarray, int64 (optional) – The index of the original string each pattern match is from

Raises:

RuntimeError – Raised if there is a server-side error thrown

Examples

>>> import arkouda as ak
>>> strings = ak.array(['1_2___', '____', '3', '__4___5____6___7', ''])
>>> strings.search('_+').find_matches(return_match_origins=True)
(array(['_', '____', '__']), array([0 1 3]))
Match.group(group_num=0, return_group_origins=False)[source]

Return a new Strings containing the capture group corresponding to group_num.

For the default, group_num=0, return the full match.

Parameters:

  • group_num (int) – The index of the capture group to be returned

  • return_group_origins (bool) – If True, return a pdarray containing the index of the original string each capture group is from

Returns:

  • Strings – Strings object containing only the capture groups corresponding to group_num

  • pdarray, int64 (optional) – The index of the original string each group is from

Examples

>>> import arkouda as ak
>>> strings = ak.array(["Isaac Newton, physics", '<-calculus->', 'Gottfried Leibniz, math'])
>>> m = strings.search("(\\w+) (\\w+)")
>>> m.group()
array(['Isaac Newton', 'Gottfried Leibniz'])
>>> m.group(1)
array(['Isaac', 'Gottfried'])
>>> m.group(2, return_group_origins=True)
(array(['Newton', 'Leibniz']), array([0 2]))