Identify which elements of a string are terminal nodes

A terminal node in a taxonomy does not have any child nodes. For example, a species is a terminal node if there are no subspecies or strains that belong to that species. This function identifies which elements of a vector are terminal nodes simply by checking whether that element appears as a substring in any other element of the vector.

get_terminal_nodes(string)

Arguments

string

A character vector of strings to check for terminal nodes

Value

A logical vector indicating which elements of the string are terminal nodes

Examples

# What does it do?
data("zeller14")
rownames(zeller14)[988:989]
#> [1] "k__Bacteria|p__Fusobacteria|c__Fusobacteriia|o__Fusobacteriales|f__Fusobacteriaceae|g__Fusobacterium|s__Fusobacterium_gonidiaformans"                                             
#> [2] "k__Bacteria|p__Fusobacteria|c__Fusobacteriia|o__Fusobacteriales|f__Fusobacteriaceae|g__Fusobacterium|s__Fusobacterium_gonidiaformans|t__Fusobacterium_gonidiaformans_unclassified"
get_terminal_nodes(rownames(zeller14)[988:989])
#> [1] FALSE  TRUE
# How do I use it to keep only terminal nodes for a lefser analysis?
terminal_nodes <- get_terminal_nodes(rownames(zeller14))
zeller14sub <- zeller14[terminal_nodes, ]
# Then continue with your analysis!