Extract letters from a column

This could be done in a single step using gsub() with back references in the regex.

gsub("^(.{3}).* (.{3}).*$", "\\1\\2", "Tom Cruise")

[1] "TomCru"

Regards,

Marc Schwartz


On Mar 13, 2013, at 9:21 AM, SH <emptican at gmail.com> wrote:

What I want to do is to extrac three letters from first and last name
and to combine them to make another column 'abb'.  The column 'abb' is
to be a my final product.  I can make column 'abb' using 'paste'
function once I have two parts from the first column 'name'.

Thanks,

Steve

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:17 AM, Jorge I Velez
<jorgeivanvelez at gmail.com> wrote:

Try

substr(tempdf$abb 4, 6)

--JIV



On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 1:15 AM, SH <emptican at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Jorge,

I gave me this result (below) since it defines starting from the forth
letter and ending 6th letter from the first element.

substr(tempdf$name, 4, 6)

[1] " Cr" "ad " "old"

I would like to have letters from first and second elements if possible.

Thanks for replying,

Steve


On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Jorge I Velez
<jorgeivanvelez at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear SH,

Hmmm... what about

substr(tempdf$name, 4, 6))

?

HTH,
Jorge.-


On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 1:06 AM, SH <emptican at gmail.com> wrote:

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