Hi Weidong,

It works, but I'm completely sure could be more efficient:

# x is a string
DELETE=function(x){
x=as.character(x)
res=NULL; for(i in 1:nchar(x)) res=c(res,substr(x,i,i))
pos=which(res=="?"|res==" ")  # Detecting "?" and  "  "
res2=res[(pos[1]+1):(pos[2]-1)]
k=length(res2)
res3=NULL; for(i in 1:k) res3=paste(res3,res2[i],sep="")
as.numeric(RS)
}

> DELETE("32?35.421 N")
[1] 35.421

I hope this helps.


Jorge



On 2/8/08, Weidong Gu <wgu@uab.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi, I ran into a problem when I complied a dataset with UTM coordinates.
> For calculating distances between sites, I need to reformat the
> coordinates from, for example,
>
>
>
> 32?35.421 N, to 35.421, i.e. I need to delete all digits before symbol ?
> and a space and N at the end of the string. What functions I should use?
>
>
>
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
>
>
>
>
> Weidong Gu,
>
> Department of Medicine
> University of Alabama, Birmingham
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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