Extracting substrings in R (regular expression)

Question

I have following strings:

"Richard H. Hoffman (60-100)" "Alex S. Simmon (72-333)" "Michael S. Pip (1-0)"

How do I use regular expression to extract only names from the string? So the results should look like:

"Richard H. Hoffman" "Alex S. Simmon" "Michael S. Pip"

Thank you

[learn regex](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4736/learning-regular-expressions) — jogo, Feb 14 '18 at 08:55

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 14 '18 at 08:52

2

We can use sub to match zero or more spaces (\\s*) followed by ( and other characters (.*), replace with blank ("")

sub("\\s*\\(.*", "", str1)
#[1] "Richard H. Hoffman" "Alex S. Simmon"     "Michael S. Pip"

str1 <- c("Richard H. Hoffman (60-100)", "Alex S. Simmon (72-333)",
             "Michael S. Pip (1-0)")

answered Feb 14 '18 at 08:52

akrun

1

There is a trigger happy downvoting problem on the site. – Tim Biegeleisen Feb 14 '18 at 08:56
3

There is rep-ladies-of-the-night problem on the site. – David Arenburg Feb 14 '18 at 11:59

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 14 '18 at 08:58

1

You could use

gsub("^([^()]+).*", "\\1", your_vector)

This captures anything neither ( nor ) into group 1 and replaces the string with the first group, see a demo on regex101.com.

answered Feb 14 '18 at 08:58

Jan

2 Answers2