R - Extract information from string following a general format - r

Question

This is a complete re-write of my original question in an attempt to clarify it and make it as answerable as possible. My objective is to write a function which takes a string as input and returns the information contained therein in tabular format. Two examples of the kind of character strings the function will face are the following
s1 <- " 9 9875 Γεωργίου Άγγελος Δημήτρης ΑΒ/Γ Π/Π Β 00:54:05 167***\r"
s2 <- " 10 8954F Smith John ΔΕΖ N ΔΕΝ ΕΚΚΙΝΗΣΕ 0\r"
(For those who had read my original question, these are smaller strings for simplicity.)
The required output would be:
Rank Code Name Club Class Time Points
9 9875 Γεωργίου Άγγελος Δημήτρης ΑΒ/Γ Π/Π Β 00:54:05 167
10 8954F Smith John ΔΕΖ N ΔΕΝ ΕΚΚΙΝΗΣΕ 0
I have managed to split the string based on where there's a blank space using:
strsplit(s1, " ")[[1]][strsplit(s1, " ")[[1]] != ""]
although a more elegant solution was given by G. Grothendieck in the comments below using:
unlist(strsplit(trimws(s1), " +"))
This results in
"9" "9875" "Γεωργίου" "Άγγελος" "Δημήτρης" "ΑΒ/Γ" "Π/Π" "Β" "00:54:05" "167***\r"
However, this is still problematic as "Γεωργίου" "Άγγελος" and "Δημήτρης" should be combined into "Γεωργίου Άγγελος Δημήτρης" (note that the number of elements could be two OR three) and the same applies to "Π/Π" "Β" which should be combined into "Π/Π Β".
The question
How can I use the additional information that I have, namely:
The order of the elements will always be the same
The Name data will consist of two or three words
The Club data (i.e. ΑΒ/Γ in s1 and ΔΕΖ in s2) will come from a pre-defined list of clubs (e.g. stored in a character vector named sClub)
The Class data (i.e. Π/Π Β in s1 and N in s2) will come from a pre-defined list of classes (e.g. stored in a character vector named sClass)
The Points data will always contain "\r" and won't contain any spaces.
to produce the required output above?

Answer 1

Defining
sClub <- c("ΑΒ/Γ", "ΔΕΖ")
sClass <- c("Π/Π Β", "N")
we may do
library(stringr)
myfun <- function(s)
gsub("\\*", "", trimws(str_match(s, paste0("^\\s*(\\d+)\\s*?(\\w+)\\s*?([\\w ]+)\\s*(", paste(sClub, collapse = "|"),")\\s*(", paste(sClass, collapse = "|"), ")(.*?)\\s*([^ ]*\r)"))[, -1]))
sapply(list(s1, s2), myfun)
# [,1] [,2]
# [1,] "9" "10"
# [2,] "9875" "8954F"
# [3,] "Γεωργίου Άγγελος Δημήτρης" "Smith John"
# [4,] "ΑΒ/Γ" "ΔΕΖ"
# [5,] "Π/Π Β" "N"
# [6,] "00:54:05" "ΔΕΝ ΕΚΚΙΝΗΣΕ"
# [7,] "167" "0"
The way it works is just taking into account all your additional information and constructing a long regex. It finishes with erasing * and removing leading/trailing whitespace.