thanks, it works well. I have to work on Arun's previous answer to make it work too.


 
David


>________________________________
> De : Rui Barradas <ruipbarradas@sapo.pt>
>À : Biau David <djmbiau@yahoo.fr> 
>Cc : r help list <r-help@r-project.org> 
>Envoyé le : Mercredi 23 janvier 2013 19h57
>Objet : Re: [R] extracting characters from a string
> 
>Hello,
>
>I've just noticed that my first solution would only return the first set 
>of alphabetic characters, such as "Van", not "Van den Hoops".
>The following will solve that problem.
>
>
>fun2 <- function(x, sep = ", "){
>    x <- strsplit(x, sep)
>    m <- lapply(x, function(y) gregexpr(" [[:alpha:]]*$", y))
>    res <- lapply(seq_along(x), function(i)
>        regmatches(x[[i]], m[[i]], invert = TRUE))
>    res <- lapply(res, unlist)
>    lapply(res, function(y) y[nchar(y) > 0])
>}
>fun2(pub)
>
>
>Hope this helps,
>
>Rui Barradas
>
>Em 23-01-2013 18:33, Rui Barradas escreveu:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Try the following.
>>
>> fun <- function(x, sep = ", "){
>>      s <- unlist(strsplit(x, sep))
>>      regmatches(s, regexpr("[[:alpha:]]*", s))
>> }
>>
>> fun(pub)
>>
>>
>> Hope this helps,
>>
>> Rui Barradas
>>
>> Em 23-01-2013 17:38, Biau David escreveu:
>>> Dear All,
>>>
>>> I have a data frame of vectors of publication names such as 'pub':
>>>
>>> pub1 <- c('Brown DK, Santos R, Rome DF, Don Juan X')
>>> pub2 <- c('Benigni D')
>>> pub3 <- c('Arstra SD, Van den Hoops DD, lamarque D')
>>>
>>> pub <- rbind(pub1, pub2, pub3)
>>>
>>>
>>> I would like to construct a dataframe with only author's last name and
>>> each last name in columns and the publication in rows. Basically I
>>> want to get rid of the initials (max 2, always before a comma) and
>>> spaces surounding last name. I would like to avoid a loop.
>>>
>>> ps: If I could have even a short explanation of the code that extract
>>> the values of the character string that would also be great!
>>>
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>>     [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>>
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>
>
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