extracting characters from a string
1. Study a regular expression tutorial on the web to learn how to do this. 2. ?regex in R summarizes (tersely! -- but clearly) R's regex's. 3. ?grep tells you about R's regular expression manipulation functions. -- Bert
On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 9:38 AM, Biau David <djmbiau at yahoo.fr> wrote:
Dear All,
I have a data frame of vectors of publication names such as 'pub':
pub1 <- c('Brown DK, Santos R, Rome DF, Don Juan X')
pub2 <- c('Benigni D')
pub3 <- c('Arstra SD, Van den Hoops DD, lamarque D')
pub <- rbind(pub1, pub2, pub3)
I would like to construct a dataframe with only author's last name and each last name in columns and the publication in rows. Basically I want to get rid of the initials (max 2, always before a comma) and spaces surounding last name. I would like to avoid a loop.
ps: If I could have even a short explanation of the code that extract the values of the character string that would also be great!
David
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