Thanks Gabor and Jim,

Both solutions worked equally well for me (now I have an embarrassment of
riches for a solution :-) ).

Now that my main problem is solved, I am happy, but I was wondering if
anyone would care to comment as to why my 'strsplit' solution doesn't behave
the way I think it should...

Thank you both again,
Matt

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 12:09 PM, Gabor Grothendieck <
ggrothendieck@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 12:53 PM, Matthew Pettis
> <matthew.pettis@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have a dataframe that has a column of vectors that I need to extract
> off
> > the character string before the first '.' character and put it into a
> > separate column.  I thought I could use 'strsplit' for it within
> > 'transform', but I can't seem to get the right invocation.  Here is a
> sample
> > dataframe that has what I have, what I want, and what I get.  Can someone
> > tell me how to get what is in the 'want' column from the 'have' column
> > programatically?
> >
> > tia,
> > Matt
> >
> > df <- data.frame(have=c("a.b.c", "d.e.f", "g.h.i"), want=c("a","d","g"))
> > df.xform <- transform(df, get=strsplit(as.character(have), split=".",
> > fixed=TRUE)[[1]][1])
> > df.xform
> >
>
> Try replacing the dot [.] and everything thereafter .* with nothing ""
> like this:
>
> transform(df, want = sub("[.].*", "", have))
>
> --
> Statistics & Software Consulting
> GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
> tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
> email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com
>



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