Extracting characters before second to last whitespace [duplicate]

Question

I'm working in R and have the following:

"BOY MAN EL PASO ND 0023256000"

And I need to extract everything from the start to the second to last space. So:

"BOY MAN EL PASO"

I've tried:

substr(output$CUSTOMER, 1, sapply(strsplit(output$CUSTOMER, "\\s+"), tail, 2))

along with tons of variations of that line. I've found solutions to this same question in other posts but they want to extract characters between a specific character (like a slash) and when I try to adjust it I don't know how to reference a space.

Can someone help me with the R syntax on how to extract these characters?

Answer 1

You can try sub with the regex pattern "^(.*)(\\s+\\S+){2}$"

> s <- "BOY MAN EL PASO ND 0023256000"

> sub("^(.*)(\\s+\\S+){2}$", "\\1", s)
[1] "BOY MAN EL PASO"