[R] Pull Stock Symbol Out of String

[William Dunlap]

The following gets the last parenthesized sequence of non-parentheses
  > sub(".*(\\([^()]+\\))([^()]*)$", "\\1", 
          c("Aetna(AET)",
             "American Tower Corp(REIT)(ATC)",
             "No Parens",
             "Qwerty Corp (ASD)(ZXC)(123) extra stuff"))
  [1] "(AET)"     "(ATC)"     "No Parens" "(123)"

Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf
> Of Sparks, John James
> Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2014 11:29 AM
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: [R] Pull Stock Symbol Out of String
> 
> Dear R Helpers,
> 
> My regex skills are beginner to intermediate and banging around the web
> has not resulted in a solution to the problem below so I hope that one of
> you who has mad skills can help me out.
> 
> I want to extract the stock ticker--AMT-- out of the string
> 
> American Tower Corporation (REIT)Â (AMT)
> 
> The presence of the other parenthetical text (REIT) makes this difficult.
> Please note that the string may or may not have a interfering set of
> characters such as the (REIT) so the solution needs to be generalizable to
> the last set of characters that are contained in parentheses in the larger
> string.  So an example of a string without the interfering (REIT) would be
> 
> Aetna Inc. (AET)
> 
> 
> Your assistance would be very much appreciated.
> 
> --John Sparks
> 
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