extracting characters from a string

Hello,

Try the following.

fun <- function(x, sep = ", "){
     s <- unlist(strsplit(x, sep))
     regmatches(s, regexpr("[[:alpha:]]*", s))
}

fun(pub)


Hope this helps,

Rui Barradas

Em 23-01-2013 17:38, Biau David escreveu:

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

    [[alternative HTML version deleted]]