[R] matching problem

[Hans-Joerg Bibiko]

On 27 Jun 2008, at 12:23, Tom.O wrote:

>
> Hi R gurus
> I have a matching problem that I cant solve. I have tried multiple  
> solutions
> and searched varius help-sites but I cant get it to work.
>
> This is the problem
> myexstrings = c("*AAA.AA","BBB BB","*.CCC.","**dd- d")
>
> what I want do do is to remove any non-characters in the beginning and
> everything else after the non-character symbol after the first set of
> characters so that the string becomes:
>
> c("AAA","BBB","CCC","dd")
>
>
> I can figure out the start, sub("^\\W*","", myexstrings,perl=T) will  
> remove
> the unwanted beginnings but then its the rest.

Try

gsub("\\W*","", myexstrings,perl=T)

Cheers,

--Hans