Extract letters from a column

HI,


tempdf<-read.table(text="
name,var1,var2,abb
Tom Cruiser,1,6,TomCru
Bread Pett,2,5,BrePet
Arnold Schwiezer,3,7,ArnSch 
",sep=",",header=TRUE,stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
?substr(tempdf$name, 4, 6) #as some of the firstnames differ in the number of characters
#[1] " Cr" "ad " "old"

?substr(gsub(".*\\s+","",tempdf$name),1,3)
#[1] "Cru" "Pet" "Sch"
A.K.



----- Original Message -----
From: Jorge I Velez <jorgeivanvelez at gmail.com>
To: SH <emptican at gmail.com>
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 10:10 AM
Subject: Re: [R] Extract letters from a column

Dear SH,

Hmmm... what about

substr(tempdf$name, 4, 6))

?

HTH,
Jorge.-

Dear list:

I would like to extract three letters from first and second elements
in one column and make a new column.

For example below,

tempdf = read.table("clipboard", header=T, sep='\t')
tempdf

? ? ? ? ? ? ?  name var1 var2? ? abb
1? ? ? Tom Cruiser? ? 1? ? 6 TomCru
2? ? ?  Bread Pett? ? 2? ? 5 BrePet
3 Arnold Schwiezer? ? 3? ? 7 ArnSch

(p1 = substr(tempdf$name, 1, 3))

[1] "Tom" "Bre" "Arn"

I was able to extract three letters from first name, however, I don't
know how to extract three letters from last name (i.e., 'Cru', 'Pet',
and 'Sch').? Can anyone give me a suggestion?? Many thanks in advance.

Best,

Steve

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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.