CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rgsub
william yarmar
william yarmar

Reputation: 11

How to remove everything between a slash sign and first space after in r

How to remove everything between a slash sign and first space after in r?

#Input:
#"David\adfghsrth333 McDonalds", "Alice Jennifer\dfgadfg555 Smith", 

#Desired output:
#"David McDonalds", "Alice Jennifer Smith"

Upvotes: 0

Views: 125

Answers (1)

Austin Graves
Austin Graves

Reputation: 1052

If you have your input in a character vector called strings, you can remove the characters between the slash sign and the following space like this

gsub('\\\\\\w+', '', strings)

The regular expression used looks strange because the backslash is a special character in both R and in regex.

  • "\\\\" matches \; note that we need so many slashes because we need to escape the special character in both R and regex
  • \\w+ only matches word characters (numbers, letters, and underscores) so it stops matching when a space is reached

Upvotes: 2

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