Message-ID: <1358963902.68687.YahooMailNeo@web142605.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Date: 2013-01-23T17:58:22Z
From: arun
Subject: extracting characters from a string
In-Reply-To: <1358962721.46908.YahooMailNeo@web172403.mail.ir2.yahoo.com>
Hi,
You could try this:
dat1<-read.table(text=pub,sep=",",fill=TRUE,stringsAsFactors=F)
dat2<- as.data.frame(do.call(cbind,lapply(dat1,function(x) gsub(" $","",gsub("^ |\\w+$","",x)))),stringsAsFactors=F)
?dat2
#??????? V1????????????? V2???????? V3???????? V4
#1?? Brown????????? Santos?????? Rome?? Don Juan
#2 Benigni??????????????????????????????????????
#3? Arstra?? Van den Hoops?? lamarque??????
A.K.
----- Original Message -----
From: Biau David <djmbiau at yahoo.fr>
To: r help list <r-help at r-project.org>
Cc:
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 12:38 PM
Subject: [R] extracting characters from a string
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]]
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