removing characters from a string

look at "?gsub()", e.g.,

string <- "ab03def10-523rtf"
string
gsub("[^0-9]", "", string)
gsub("[0-9]", "", string)


I hope it helps.

Best,
Dimitris

----
Dimitris Rizopoulos
Ph.D. Student
Biostatistical Centre
School of Public Health
Catholic University of Leuven

Address: Kapucijnenvoer 35, Leuven, Belgium
Tel: +32/16/336899
Fax: +32/16/337015
Web: http://www.med.kuleuven.ac.be/biostat/
     http://www.student.kuleuven.ac.be/~m0390867/dimitris.htm


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Vivek Rao" <rvivekrao at yahoo.com>
To: <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 2:54 PM
Subject: [R] removing characters from a string

Is there a simple way in R to remove all characters
from a string other than those in a specified set? For
example, I want to keep only the digits 0-9 in a
string.

In general, I have found the string handling abilities
of R a bit limited. (Of course it's great for stats in
general). Is there a good reference on this? Or should
R programmers dump their output to a text file and use
something like Perl or Python for sophisticated text
processing?

I am familiar with the basic functions such as nchar,
substring, as.integer, print, cat, sprintf etc.

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