get initials from string of words

Question

What I have:

names <- c("First Last", "First M Last", "First M. Last", "first Last", "first lAst")

What I want:

"FL" "FML" "FML" "FL" "FL"

What I tried:

paste(substr(strsplit(names, " ")[[1]], 1, 1), collapse="")

What this gives:

FL

How can I get this for all elements?

Answer 1

> names <- c("First Last", "First M Last", "First M. Last", 
             "first Last", "first lAst")

It looks like you want the result to be all upper case? If that's the case, we can use toupper inside sapply with similar code to what you've tried.

> s <- strsplit(names, " ")
> sapply(s, function(x){
      toupper(paste(substring(x, 1, 1), collapse = ""))
  })
# [1] "FL"  "FML" "FML" "FL"  "FL"