CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rgsub
Eric Fail
Eric Fail

Reputation: 7928

gsub First-name Last-name to FL

I would like to change a range of names to simply their initials,

Say I have two names c("Ben Franklin", "Millard Fillmore") and I would like to subset them to c("BF", "MF"), I have read the help fil eto ?gsub but I cannot figure it out. Can anyone here help me?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 610

Answers (3)

G. Grothendieck
G. Grothendieck

Reputation: 269895

This removes everything that is not an upper case letter:

> s <- c("Ben Franklin", "Millard Fillmore")
> gsub("[^A-Z]", "", s)
[1] "BF" "MF"

Here is a more complex regular expression if you have strings such "Allan McCormick" as per comments:

s <- c("Ben Franklin", "Millard Fillmore", "Allen McCormick")
gsub("(.)\\S* *", "\\1", s)
[1] "BF" "MF" "AM"

Upvotes: 2

agstudy
agstudy

Reputation: 121598

just with gsub

 gsub(pattern='(.)(.*)[[:space:]](.)(.*)','\\1\\3',c("Ben Franklin", "Millard Fillmore"))

 "BF" "MF"

Upvotes: 1

GSee
GSee

Reputation: 49820

Split the strings on " ", then apply the substr function to each component and collapse the results with paste

> x <- c("Ben Franklin", "Millard Fillmore")
> sapply(strsplit(x, " "), function(x) paste(substr(x, 1, 1), collapse=""))
[1] "BF" "MF"

Upvotes: 2

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