Exclude Argument in getCandidateCodes Excludes Partial Matches Instead of Exact Terms

[annasaura]

The "exclude" argument in the getCandidateCodes function excludes all codes that contain the specified character vectors. However, I believe it would be more useful if it excluded only the exact words or character sequences specified.

For example, when phenotyping depression, I included codes containing the words "depression" or "depressive" and their descendants. However, some codes such as "ST depression" (referring to ECG changes and not the mental health condition) were also included. When I specified "ST depression" in the exclude argument, all codes containing the word "depression" were excluded, excluding the main codes relevant for the depression phenotype.

Thanks!

[edward-burn]

Thanks @annasaura, we'll hopefully implement something for this for the next release (v.3.6.0) probably early next month. I'm thinking to keep the current behaviour as is (so that it is not a breaking change), but with some option that can be activated to do exact matching (either an extra argument or supporting special characters - e.g. "/ST depression/" to do an exact match) - what do you think?