R Trim characters of items in Vector

Question

I need to figure out how to trim the characters for every entry in a character vector. I have searched and tried to use a ^ when referring back to the vector but it has not worked. I am sure there is a simple way to do this that I am not aware of.

Example:

CV <- c("ABC_001", "ABC_002", "DEF_003", "DEF_004", "GHIJKLM_005", "GHIJKLM_006")

Desired format of character vector CV:

"ABC","ABC","DEF","DEF","GHIJKLM","GHIJKLM"

Thanks for your help!

`library(stringr)` and `str_extract(CV, "[A-Z]*")`. If anticiapting lowercase letters as well `str_extract(CV, "[a-zA-Z]*")` — Simon Jackson, Apr 04 '17 at 22:41
@RichScriven - surely a duplicate - maybe http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17187552/removing-everything-after-first-backslash-in-a-string is close enough ? — thelatemail, Apr 05 '17 at 00:02

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 04 '17 at 22:36

2

gsub("[^A-Z]", "", CV)

https://regex101.com/ I found this website very helpful for testing regular expressions. Good luck!

answered Apr 04 '17 at 22:36

mac_staben

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 04 '17 at 22:55

1

In this particular example it seems that you want to more to split your strings using the underscore symbol. If that is the case you can use strsplit:

sapply (strsplit (CV, split = "_"), "[", 1)

answered Apr 04 '17 at 22:55

dmontaner

2,076
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R Trim characters of items in Vector

2 Answers2