CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rregex
user2716568
user2716568

Reputation: 1946

Keep only capitalised words and remove spaces in between

I have the following character vector of elements that include individual's full names.

strings <- c("Michelle Jane Smith", "Elise Alice Smith", "Ronald James Smith", "Thomas John Smith")

I now wish to extract each capital letter, removing the spaces in between. This would give initials. My anticipated output would be:

output <- c("MJS", "EAS", "RJS", "TJS")

Is this please possible?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 246

Answers (4)

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 887148

Or using capture groups

gsub("([A-Z]+)[a-z ]+", "\\1", strings)
#[1] "MJS" "EAS" "RJS" "TJS"

Upvotes: 2

d.b
d.b

Reputation: 32548

Using str_extract_all command of stringr package, you can extract the characters that match the pattern for uppercase letters ("[A-Z]+") and paste them together.

library(stringr)
sapply(str_extract_all(string = strings, pattern = "[A-Z]+"),
        function(a) paste(a, collapse = ""))
#[1] "MJS" "EAS" "RJS" "TJS"

Or instead of looking for uppercase characters, you could just extract the first character of each word in strings

sapply(strsplit(x = strings, split = " "), function(a)
    paste(substr(x = a, start = 1, stop = 1), collapse = ""))
#[1] "MJS" "EAS" "RJS" "TJS"

Upvotes: 2

neilfws
neilfws

Reputation: 33782

Using gsub:

gsub("[a-z ]", "", strings)

Upvotes: 2

SymbolixAU
SymbolixAU

Reputation: 26258

how about a gsub 

gsub("[a-z]| ", "", strings)
[1] "MJS" "EAS" "RJS" "TJS"

Upvotes: 2

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