Extract string before "|" [duplicate]

Question

I have a data set wherein a column looks like this:

ABC|DEF|GHI,   ABCD|EFG|HIJK,   ABCDE|FGHI|JKL,   DEF|GHIJ|KLM,   GHI|JKLM|NO|PQRS,   BCDE|FGHI|JKL   

.... and so on

I need to extract the characters that appear before the first | symbol.

In Excel, we would use a combination of MID-SEARCH or a LEFT-SEARCH, R contains substr().

The syntax is - substr(x, <start>,<stop>)

In my case, start will always be 1. For stop, we need to search by |. How can we achieve this? Are there alternate ways to do this?

Answer 1

We can use sub

sub("\\|.*", "", str1) #[1] "ABC" 

Or with strsplit

strsplit(str1, "[|]")[[1]][1] #[1] "ABC" 

Update

If we use the data from @hrbrmstr

sub("\\|.*", "", df$V1) #[1] "ABC"   "ABCD"  "ABCDE" "DEF"   "GHI"   "BCDE"  

These are all base R methods. No external packages used.

data

str1 <- "ABC|DEF|GHI ABCD|EFG|HIJK ABCDE|FGHI|JKL DEF|GHIJ|KLM GHI|JKLM|NO|PQRS BCDE|FGHI|JKL" 

Answer 2

Another option word function of stringr package

library(stringr) word(df1$V1,1,sep = "\\|") 

Data

df1 <- read.table(text = "ABC|DEF|GHI,   ABCD|EFG|HIJK,   ABCDE|FGHI|JKL,   DEF|GHIJ|KLM,   GHI|JKLM|NO|PQRS,   BCDE|FGHI|JKL")