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I have a string.
str = c("F14 : M114L","W15 : M116L, W15 : M118L","W15 : D111L, F14 : E112L, F14 : M116L")
The goal is to delete anything between : and L (also includes the white space right in front of :) such that I would end up having
"F14", "W15, W15", "W15, F14, F14"
I am thinking using
gsub(" : [[:alnum:]]L", "", str)
But clearly it does not work. Don't know if there is something like a wildcard that can represent any number of digits and characters between : and L.
569
Remove Specific Character from StringUse gsub() function to remove a character from a string or text in R. This is an R base function that takes 3 arguments, first, the character to look for, second, the value to replace with, in our case we use blank string, and the third input string were to replace.
To remove a character in an R data frame column, we can use gsub function which will replace the character with blank. For example, if we have a data frame called df that contains a character column say x which has a character ID in each value then it can be removed by using the command gsub("ID","",as.
To remove dot and number at the end of the string, we can use gsub function. It will search for the pattern of dot and number at the end of the string in the vector then removal of the pattern can be done by using double quotes without space.
To remove the string's first character, we can use the built-in substring() function in R. The substring() function accepts 3 arguments, the first one is a string, the second is start position, third is end position.
This will do it:
gsub(" : .*?L", "", str)
#[1] "F14" "W15, W15" "W15, F14, F14"
You can do this with ease using the qdapRegex package that I maintain:
str = c("F14 : M114L","W15 : M116L, W15 : M118L","W15 : D111L, F14 : E112L, F14 : M116L")
library(qdapRegex)
rm_between(str, "\\s:", "L")
## [1] "F14" "W15, W15" "W15, F14, F14"
qdapRegex aims to be useful as it teaches. If you are interested in the regex used...
S("@rm_between", "\\s:", "L")
## [1] "(\\s:)(.*?)(L)"
gsub(S("@rm_between", "\\s:", "L") , "", str)
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