[R] Extracting first number after * in a character vector

[Jim Lemon]

Hi Abhinaba,
I'm sure that someone will post a terrifyingly elegant regular
expression that does this, but:

 ardat<-
 c([1] "     1 X[0,SMITH]   *              0             0             1 ",
 ...
numpoststar<-function(x) {
 xsplit<-unlist(strsplit(x,""))
 starpos<-which(xsplit=="*")
 # watch out for a missing asterisk, they cause an infinite loop
 if(length(starpos)) {
  digits<-c("0","1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9")
  while(!any(digits %in% xsplit[starpos])) starpos<-starpos+1
  return(as.numeric(xsplit[starpos]))
 }
 return(NA)
}

for(i in 1:length(ardat)) print(numpoststar(ardat[i]))

The observant will wonder why I didn't use sapply. Because for some
reason it returned the original strings rather than the numbers. I
dunno.

Jim

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 11:29 PM, Abhinaba Roy <abhinabaroy09 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> How do I extract the first number after '*' in a vector?
>
> The vector is given below
>
>> dput(out[1:10])
> c("     1 X[0,SMITH]   *              0             0             1 ",
> "     2 X[0,JOHNSON] *              0             0             1 ",
> "     3 X[0,WILLIAMS]", "                    *              1             0
>             1 ",
> "     4 X[0,JONES]   *              0             0             1 ",
> "     5 X[0,BROWN]   *              0             0             1 ",
> "     6 X[0,DAVIS]   *              0             0             1 ",
> "     7 X[0,MILLER]  *              0             0             1 ",
> "     8 X[0,WILSON]  *              0             0             1 ",
> "     9 X[0,MOORE]   *              0             0             1 "
> )
>
> I want a vector with the first number after the asterisk.
>
> So the output would give me, a vector (0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0)
>
> How can I do it in R?
>
> Best,
> Abhinaba
>
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>
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