[R] Extract letters from a column

arun smartpink111 at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 13 15:24:22 CET 2013



HI,


tempdf<-read.table(text="
name,var1,var2,abb
Tom Cruiser,1,6,TomCru
Bread Pett,2,5,BrePet
Arnold Schwiezer,3,7,ArnSch 
",sep=",",header=TRUE,stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
 substr(tempdf$name, 4, 6) #as some of the firstnames differ in the number of characters
#[1] " Cr" "ad " "old"

 substr(gsub(".*\\s+","",tempdf$name),1,3)
#[1] "Cru" "Pet" "Sch"
A.K.



----- Original Message -----
From: Jorge I Velez <jorgeivanvelez at gmail.com>
To: SH <emptican at gmail.com>
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 10:10 AM
Subject: Re: [R] Extract letters from a column

Dear SH,

Hmmm... what about

substr(tempdf$name, 4, 6))

?

HTH,
Jorge.-


On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 1:06 AM, SH <emptican at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear list:
>
> I would like to extract three letters from first and second elements
> in one column and make a new column.
>
> For example below,
>
> > tempdf = read.table("clipboard", header=T, sep='\t')
> > tempdf
>               name var1 var2    abb
> 1      Tom Cruiser    1    6 TomCru
> 2       Bread Pett    2    5 BrePet
> 3 Arnold Schwiezer    3    7 ArnSch
> > (p1 = substr(tempdf$name, 1, 3))
> [1] "Tom" "Bre" "Arn"
>
> I was able to extract three letters from first name, however, I don't
> know how to extract three letters from last name (i.e., 'Cru', 'Pet',
> and 'Sch').  Can anyone give me a suggestion?  Many thanks in advance.
>
> Best,
>
> Steve
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

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