R: Want to check if any element of a set of words appear in a certain string

Question

Assuming I have a dataframe called items, and the first column is ItemNames. I'd like to go through each item in in items$ItemNames and check if they contain any of these words in:

words = c("apple","Apple","Pear","pear")

and if they do, replace the entire string with the word "confirmed".

What I've tried:

I used a combination of a for loop and if statement to do it but it failed:

search = function(x){
    words = c("apple","Apple","Pear","pear")
    for (i in length(x)){
        if (grepl(words, x[1][i]) == TRUE){  #where x[1][i] is the individual element in the ItemNames.
            x[1][i] = "confirmed"}
    }
}

search(items)

It didn't work. Ideally, I should have all the names in ItemNames replaced with "confirmed" if they contain any of the elements in words.

Answer 1

Using stringr:

library(stringr)

words <- c("apple", "Apple", "Pear", "pear")
pattern <- paste(words, collapse = "|")

dt <- data.frame(
  ItemNames = c("Superb apple", "Superb Pear", "Superb car"), 
  Cost = c(1, 2, 3),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)

index <- str_detect(dt$ItemNames, regex(pattern))
dt[index,]$ItemNames <- "confirmed"