[R] Number of words in a string

[Hans-Jörg Bibiko]

On 09.04.2008, at 17:46, Shubha Vishwanath Karanth wrote:
> To put it simple,
>
> C=c("My Dog", "Its really good", "Beautiful")
>
> Now,
> SOMEFUNCTION(C) should give: c("My", "Its really", "")

SOMEFUNCTION <- function(x) gsub(" *\\w+$", "", x)

But be aware that this won't work for instance for combining diacritics.
If you have this:

C <- c("My Dog", "Its really good", "Beautiful", "Tuli faŝda")

in fasda above the s is a combining circumfix ^

would give

[1] "My"         "Its really" ""           "Tuli faŝ"

Then one should use the strsplit approach.

Cheers,

--Hans