extracting names and numbers using regex - r

Question

I think I might have some issues with understanding the regular expressions in R.
I need to extract phone numbers and names from a sample vector and create a data-frame with corresponding columns for names and numbers using stringr package functionality.
The following is my sample vector.
phones <- c("Ann 077-789663", "Johnathan 99656565",
"Maria2 099-65-6569 office")
The code that I came up with to extract those is as follows
numbers <- str_remove_all(phones, pattern = "[^0-9]")
numbers <- str_remove_all(numbers, pattern = "[a-zA-Z]")
numbers <- trimws(numbers)
names <- str_remove_all(phones, pattern = "[A-Za-z]+", simplify = T)
phones_data <- data.frame("Name" = names, "Phone" = numbers)
It doesn't work, as it takes the digit in the name and joins with the phone number. (not optimal code as well)
I would appreciate some help in explaining the simplest way for accomplishing this task.

Answer 1

Not a regex expert, however with stringr package we can extract a number pattern with optional "-" in it and replace the "-" with empty string to extract numbers without any "-". For names, we extract the first word at the beginning of the string.
library(stringr)
data.frame(Name = str_extract(phones, "^[A-Za-z]+"),
Number = gsub("-","",str_extract(phones, "[0-9]+[-]?[0-9]+[-]?[0-9]+")))
# Name Number
#1 Ann 077789663
#2 Johnathan 99656565
#3 Maria 099656569
If you want to stick completely with stringr we can use str_replace_all instead of gsub
data.frame(Name = str_extract(phones, "[A-Za-z]+"),
Number=str_replace_all(str_extract(phones, "[0-9]+[-]?[0-9]+[-]?[0-9]+"), "-",""))
# Name Number
#1 Ann 077789663
#2 Johnathan 99656565
#3 Maria 099656569

Answer 2

I think Ronak's answer is good for the name part, I don't really have a good alternative to offer there.
For numbers, I would go with "numbers and hyphens, with a word boundary at either end", i.e.
numbers = str_extract(phones, "\\b[-0-9]+\\b") %>%
str_remove_all("-")
# Can also specify that you need at least 5 numbers/hyphens
# in a row to match
numbers2 = str_extract(phones, "\\b[-0-9]{5,}\\b") %>%
str_remove_all("-")
That way, you're not locked into a fixed format for the number of hyphens that appear in the number (my suggested regex allows for any number).

Answer 3

If you (like me) prefer to use base-R and want to keep the regex as simple as possible you could do something like this:
phone_split <- lapply(
strsplit(phones, " "),
function(x) {
name_part <- grepl("[^-0-9]", x)
c(
name = paste(x[name_part], collapse = " "),
phone = x[!name_part]
)
}
)
phone_split
[[1]]
name phone
"Ann" "077-789663"
[[2]]
name phone
"Johnathan" "99656565"
[[3]]
name phone
"Maria2 office" "099-65-6569"
do.call(rbind, phone_split)
name phone
[1,] "Ann" "077-789663"
[2,] "Johnathan" "99656565"
[3,] "Maria2 office" "099-65-6569"