CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
Curious
Curious

Reputation: 549

Getting Initials from a string in R

What is the best way to extract the initials from a string (except for the last word)? For example convert "GEORGE SMITH BROGAN" to "GS BROGAN"

NAMES <- data.frame(ID = c("GEORGE SMITH BROGAN","ADAM STEVE WILLIS","UNITED INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING STATION")

The desired output for the above names would be GS BROGAN, AS WILLIS, UIS STATION.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 542

Answers (2)

acylam
acylam

Reputation: 18691

Here is a different method using gsub:

gsub('\\s(?![A-Z]+$)', '', 
     gsub('(?<!\\s|^)[A-Z]+\\s', ' ', NAMES$ID, 
          perl = TRUE), perl = TRUE)
# [1] "GS BROGAN"   "AS WILLIS"   "UIS STATION"

Upvotes: 0

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 887621

We can try with gsub

gsub("\\s+(?=[A-Z]\\b)", "", 
   gsub("\\b([A-Z])\\w+\\s|\\s(\\w+)$", "\\1 \\2", NAMES$ID), perl = TRUE)
#[1] "GS BROGAN"   "AS WILLIS"   "UIS STATION"

Or use strsplit with paste

sapply(strsplit(as.character(NAMES$ID), "\\s+"),
  function(x) paste(paste(substr(x[-length(x)], 1, 1), collapse=""), 
      x[length(x)]))
#[1] "GS BROGAN"   "AS WILLIS"   "UIS STATION"

Upvotes: 2

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