Replace divided by symbol in numeric column

Question

I have a data frame with following contents:

df$old_price <- c('SR 2356' , 'SR 785' , 'SR 50/4 pack', 'SR 10/4 pack,'SR 490')

How do I replace values in old_price column where values such 'SR 50/4 pack' or 'SR 10/4 pack to give out 12.5 and 2.5 respectively without corrupting the data?

I tried df$old_price <- as.integer(gsub('[a-zA-Z]', '', df$old_price)). However, it seems like it creates strange column values.

Answer 1

This could be another solution:

library(stringr)

unlist(lapply(str_extract(vec, "\\d.*\\d"), \(x) eval(parse(text = x))))

[1] 2356.0  785.0   12.5    2.5  490.0

An alternative regex solution to suggested by dear Ian Campbell:

unlist(lapply(str_extract(vec, "[\\d,./]+"), \(x) eval(parse(text = x))))