Hello all,

Let's say I have a character string
"Race-ethnicity-----coding information"

I want to extract all text before the multiple dashes, including the word
"ethnicity."

I wrote a handy function to extract the first matched text:

grepcut <- function(pattern,x){
start.and.length <- regexpr(pattern,x)
substring(x,start.and.length,start.and.length
+attr(start.and.length,"match.length")-1)}

grepcut("^[^-]+","Race-ethnicity-----coding information")

The above grepcut, of course, returns only the string "Race"  What I really
want is a to create a class of two dashes in a row and then negate that. Is
it possible to create a class of repeated characters?  If so, it might be
further complicated that "-" is a special character in brackets and can only
go first or last.

Can anyone help me out?

Thanks,
Michael Young

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