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Extract letters from a column

10 messages · Jorge I Velez, arun, Steve Hong +1 more

#
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,
name var1 var2    abb
1      Tom Cruiser    1    6 TomCru
2       Bread Pett    2    5 BrePet
3 Arnold Schwiezer    3    7 ArnSch
[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
#
Dear Jorge,

I gave me this result (below) since it defines starting from the forth
letter and ending 6th letter from the first element.
[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:
#
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:
#
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.-
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 1:06 AM, SH <emptican at gmail.com> wrote:

            
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#
Thank you so much, Jorge and arun!!!  Both works well.

Steve

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:26 AM, Jorge I Velez
<jorgeivanvelez at gmail.com> wrote:
#
This could be done in a single step using gsub() with back references in the regex.
[1] "TomCru"

Regards,

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

            
#
mmm... great!  Thanks a lot all of you for helps!!!

Steve
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz at me.com> wrote: