CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rregex
Neil
Neil

Reputation: 8247

How to remove only numbers from string

I have following dataframe in R

ID     Village_Name     
1      23
2      Name-23
3      34
4      Vasai2
5      23

I only want to remove numbers from Village_Name, my desired dataframe would be

ID     Village_Name     
1      Name-23
2      Vasai2

How can I do it in R?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 228

Answers (2)

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 887951

We can use grepl to match one or more numbers from the start (^) till the end ($) of the numbers and negate (!) it so that all numbers only elements become FALSE and others TRUE

i1 <- !grepl("^[0-9]+$", df1$Village_Name)
df1[i1, ]

Based on the OP's post, it could be also

data.frame(ID = head(df1$ID, sum(i1)), Village_Name = df1$Village_Name[i1])
#   ID Village_Name
#1  1      Name-23
#2  2       Vasai2

Or another option is to convert to numeric resulting in non-numeric elements to be NA and is changed to a logical vector with is.na

df1[is.na(as.numeric(df1$Village_Name)),]

Upvotes: 4

Tim Biegeleisen
Tim Biegeleisen

Reputation: 522762

Here is another option using sub:

df1[nchar(sub("\\d+", "", df1$Village_Name)) > 0, ]

Demo

The basic idea is to strip off all digits from the Village_Name column, then assert that there is at least one character remaining, which would imply that the entry is not entirely numerical.

But, I would probably go with the grepl option given by @akrun in practice.

Upvotes: 2

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