add space between 2 strings

Question

I would like to add whitespace between a . and number.

My exampe as below

df <- data.frame(name1 = c("Acranthera sp.01", "Aglaia spectabilis (Miq.) S.S.Jain & Bennet", "Alyxia sp.11"))

df
                                       name1
1                            Acranthera sp.01
2 Aglaia spectabilis (Miq.) S.S.Jain & Bennet
3                                Alyxia sp.11

My desired output

                                       name1
1                            Acranthera sp. 01
2 Aglaia spectabilis (Miq.) S.S.Jain & Bennet
3                                Alyxia sp. 11

So far, I only know to use str_pad to add the space. Any sugesstions for this with tidyverse and stringr?

Answer 1

mutate(
  df, 
  name1 = str_replace(
    name1, 
      "\\.(\\d)", # Match a literal . followed by a digit (capturing group 1)
      ". \\1"  # Replace by a ., space and the content of the first capturing group (the digit following the .)
  )
)

Answer 2

in base R:

df$name1 <- gsub("(\\.)([0-9])", "\\1 \\2", df$name1)