CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rstring
user3640617
user3640617

Reputation: 1576

Cut string at complete word closest to certain character number

I'm trying to split a vector of strings into two pieces (I only want to keep the first bit) based on the following criteria:

Example:

textvec <- c("this is an example", "I hope someone can help me", "Thank you in advance")

Expected result is a vector like this:

"this is an" , "I hope someone", "Thank you in"

What I tried so far: I'm able to get the full words that occur before or at the 12th character like this:

t13 <- substr(textvec , 1, 13) #gives me first 13 characters of each string
lastspace <- lapply(gregexpr(" ", t13), FUN=function(x) x[length(x)]) #gives me last space before/at 13th character
result <- substr(t13, start=1, stop=lastspace)

But what I want is to get include the word closest to the 12th character (e.g. "someone" in the example above), not necessarily before or at the 12th character. In case there's a tie, I would like to include the word after the 12th character. I hope I'm explaining myself clearly :)

Upvotes: 3

Views: 250

Answers (2)

Sotos
Sotos

Reputation: 51582

Using cumsum, 

sapply(strsplit(textvec, ' '), function(i) paste(i[cumsum(nchar(i)) <= 12], collapse = ' '))

#[1] "this is an"     "I hope someone" "Thank you in"

Upvotes: 3

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 887711

We can use gregexpr to find the closest space at 12 and then with substr cut the string

substr(textvec, 1, sapply(gregexpr("\\s+", textvec), 
            function(x) x[which.min(abs(12 - x))])-1)
#[1] "this is an"     "I hope someone" "Thank you in"

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions