[R] matching problem

[Daniel Folkinshteyn]

this should do what you want:

 > myexstrings = c("*AAA.AA","BBB BB","*.CCC.","**dd- d")
 > a = gsub("^\\W*","", myexstrings,perl=T)
 > b = gsub("\\W.*", "", a, perl=T)
 > b
[1] "AAA" "BBB" "CCC" "dd"

first one, removes any non-word characters from the beginning (as you 
already figured out)
second one, removes any remaining non-word characters AND everything 
following.

on 06/27/2008 06:23 AM Tom.O said the following:
> 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.
> 
> And please no links to any helppages, I have been looking at most of them
> for the last hour without any success.
> 
> Thanks
> Regards
> Tom
>