How can I get the last n characters from a string in R?
Is there a function like SQL's RIGHT?
I'm not aware of anything in base R, but it's straight-forward to make a function to do this using substr and nchar:
x <- "some text in a string"
substrRight <- function(x, n){
substr(x, nchar(x)-n+1, nchar(x))
}
substrRight(x, 6)
[1] "string"
substrRight(x, 8)
[1] "a string"
This is vectorised, as #mdsumner points out. Consider:
x <- c("some text in a string", "I really need to learn how to count")
substrRight(x, 6)
[1] "string" " count"
If you don't mind using the stringr package, str_sub is handy because you can use negatives to count backward:
x <- "some text in a string"
str_sub(x,-6,-1)
[1] "string"
Or, as Max points out in a comment to this answer,
str_sub(x, start= -6)
[1] "string"
Use stri_sub function from stringi package.
To get substring from the end, use negative numbers.
Look below for the examples:
stri_sub("abcde",1,3)
[1] "abc"
stri_sub("abcde",1,1)
[1] "a"
stri_sub("abcde",-3,-1)
[1] "cde"
You can install this package from github: https://github.com/Rexamine/stringi
It is available on CRAN now, simply type
install.packages("stringi")
to install this package.
str = 'This is an example'
n = 7
result = substr(str,(nchar(str)+1)-n,nchar(str))
print(result)
> [1] "example"
>
Another reasonably straightforward way is to use regular expressions and sub:
sub('.*(?=.$)', '', string, perl=T)
So, "get rid of everything followed by one character". To grab more characters off the end, add however many dots in the lookahead assertion:
sub('.*(?=.{2}$)', '', string, perl=T)
where .{2} means .., or "any two characters", so meaning "get rid of everything followed by two characters".
sub('.*(?=.{3}$)', '', string, perl=T)
for three characters, etc. You can set the number of characters to grab with a variable, but you'll have to paste the variable value into the regular expression string:
n = 3
sub(paste('.+(?=.{', n, '})', sep=''), '', string, perl=T)
UPDATE: as noted by mdsumner, the original code is already vectorised because substr is. Should have been more careful.
And if you want a vectorised version (based on Andrie's code)
substrRight <- function(x, n){
sapply(x, function(xx)
substr(xx, (nchar(xx)-n+1), nchar(xx))
)
}
> substrRight(c("12345","ABCDE"),2)
12345 ABCDE
"45" "DE"
Note that I have changed (nchar(x)-n) to (nchar(x)-n+1) to get n characters.
A simple base R solution using the substring() function (who knew this function even existed?):
RIGHT = function(x,n){
substring(x,nchar(x)-n+1)
}
This takes advantage of basically being substr() underneath but has a default end value of 1,000,000.
Examples:
> RIGHT('Hello World!',2)
[1] "d!"
> RIGHT('Hello World!',8)
[1] "o World!"
Try this:
x <- "some text in a string"
n <- 5
substr(x, nchar(x)-n, nchar(x))
It shoudl give:
[1] "string"
An alternative to substr is to split the string into a list of single characters and process that:
N <- 2
sapply(strsplit(x, ""), function(x, n) paste(tail(x, n), collapse = ""), N)
I use substr too, but in a different way. I want to extract the last 6 characters of "Give me your food." Here are the steps:
(1) Split the characters
splits <- strsplit("Give me your food.", split = "")
(2) Extract the last 6 characters
tail(splits[[1]], n=6)
Output:
[1] " " "f" "o" "o" "d" "."
Each of the character can be accessed by splits[[1]][x], where x is 1 to 6.
someone before uses a similar solution to mine, but I find it easier to think as below:
> text<-"some text in a string" # we want to have only the last word "string" with 6 letter
> n<-5 #as the last character will be counted with nchar(), here we discount 1
> substr(x=text,start=nchar(text)-n,stop=nchar(text))
This will bring the last characters as desired.
For those coming from Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, you would have seen functions like LEFT(), RIGHT(), and MID(). I have created a package known as forstringr and its development version is currently on Github.
if(!require("devtools")){
install.packages("devtools")
}
devtools::install_github("gbganalyst/forstringr")
library(forstringr)
the str_left(): This counts from the left and then extract n characters
the str_right()- This counts from the right and then extract n characters
the str_mid()- This extract characters from the middle
Examples:
x <- "some text in a string"
str_left(x, 4)
[1] "some"
str_right(x, 6)
[1] "string"
str_mid(x, 6, 4)
[1] "text"
I used the following code to get the last character of a string.
substr(output, nchar(stringOfInterest), nchar(stringOfInterest))
You can play with the nchar(stringOfInterest) to figure out how to get last few characters.
A little modification on #Andrie solution gives also the complement:
substrR <- function(x, n) {
if(n > 0) substr(x, (nchar(x)-n+1), nchar(x)) else substr(x, 1, (nchar(x)+n))
}
x <- "moSvmC20F.5.rda"
substrR(x,-4)
[1] "moSvmC20F.5"
That was what I was looking for. And it invites to the left side:
substrL <- function(x, n){
if(n > 0) substr(x, 1, n) else substr(x, -n+1, nchar(x))
}
substrL(substrR(x,-4),-2)
[1] "SvmC20F.5"
Just in case if a range of characters need to be picked:
# For example, to get the date part from the string
substrRightRange <- function(x, m, n){substr(x, nchar(x)-m+1, nchar(x)-m+n)}
value <- "REGNDATE:20170526RN"
substrRightRange(value, 10, 8)
[1] "20170526"
I am in R and would like to extract a two digit number 38y from the following string:
"/Users/files/folder/file_number_23a_version_38y_Control.txt"
I know that _Control always comes after the 38y and that 38y is preceded by an underscore. How can I use strsplit or other R commands to extract the 38y?
You could use
regmatches(x, regexpr("[^_]+(?=_Control)", x, perl = TRUE))
# [1] "38y"
or equivalently
stringr::str_extract(x, "[^_]+(?=_Control)")
# [1] "38y"
Using gsub.
gsub('.*_(.*)_Control.*', '\\1', x)
# [1] "38y"
See demo with detailed explanation.
A possible solution:
library(stringr)
text <- "/Users/files/folder/file_number_23a_version_38y_Control.txt"
str_extract(text, "(?<=_)\\d+\\D(?=_Control)")
#> [1] "38y"
You can find an explanation of the regex part at:
https://regex101.com/r/PQSZHX/1
text <- c('d__Viruses|f__Closteroviridae|g__Closterovirus|s__Citrus_tristeza_virus',
'd__Viruses|o__Tymovirales|f__Alphaflexiviridae|g__Mandarivirus|s__Citrus_yellow_vein_clearing_virus',
'd__Viruses|o__Ortervirales|f__Retroviridae|s__Columba_palumbus_retrovirus')
I have tried but failed:
str_extract(text, pattern = 'f.*\\|')
How can I get
f__Closteroviridae
f__Alphaflexiviridae
f__Retroviridae
Any help will be high appreciated!
Make the regex non-greedy and since you don't want "|" in final output use positive lookahead.
stringr::str_extract(text, 'f.*?(?=\\|)')
#[1] "f__Closteroviridae" "f__Alphaflexiviridae" "f__Retroviridae"
In base R, we can use sub :
sub('.*(f_.*?)\\|.*', '\\1', text)
#[1] "f__Closteroviridae" "f__Alphaflexiviridae" "f__Retroviridae"
For a base R solution, I would use regmatches along with gregexpr:
m <- gregexpr("\\bf__[^|]+", text)
as.character(regmatches(text, m))
[1] "f__Closteroviridae" "f__Alphaflexiviridae" "f__Retroviridae"
The advantage of using gregexpr as above is that should an input contain more than one f__ matching term, we could also capture it. For example:
x <- 'd__Viruses|f__Closteroviridae|g__Closterovirus|f__some_virus'
m <- gregexpr("\\bf__[^|]+", x)
regmatches(x, m)[[1]]
[1] "f__Closteroviridae" "f__some_virus"
Data:
text <- c('d__Viruses|f__Closteroviridae|g__Closterovirus|s__Citrus_tristeza_virus',
'd__Viruses|o__Tymovirales|f__Alphaflexiviridae|g__Mandarivirus|s__Citrus_yellow_vein_clearing_virus',
'd__Viruses|o__Ortervirales|f__Retroviridae|s__Columba_palumbus_retrovirus')
I have a vector of URLs and need to extract a certain part of it. I've tried using a regex tester to see if my attempts worked, but they were no good.
The URLs I have are in this format: https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIL/1976.shtml
I ned to extract the three letters after "teams/" (so for the example above, I need "MIL")
Does anyone have any idea how to get the correct regular expression to get this working? Thanks.
1) basename/dirname Try this:
u <- "https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIL/1976.shtml" # input data
basename(dirname(u))
## [1] "MIL"
2) sub or with a regular expression:
sub(".*teams/(.*?)/.*", "\\1", u)
## [1] "MIL"
3) strsplit Split the string on / and take the second last component.
s <- strsplit(u, "/")[[1]]
s[length(s) - 1]
## [1] "MIL"
4) gsub Since the required substring is all upper case and no other characters in the input are this gsub which removes all characters that are not upper case letters would work:
gsub("[^A-Z]", "", u)
## [1] "MIL"
Many different ways to achieve this using regexp's. Here's one:
url <- "https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIL/1976.shtml"
gsub(".+teams/(\\w{3}).+$", "\\1", url);
#[1] "MIL"
Or
x <- c('https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIL/1976.shtml')
pattern <- "/teams/([^/]+)"
m <- regexec(pattern, x)
res = regmatches(x, m)[[1]]
res[2]
which yields
[1] "MIL"
Consider using the stringr package to simplify your code when handling strings.
Use a regular expression with positive lookbehind to catch alphanumeric codes following the string "teams\":
stringr::str_extract(url, "(?<=teams\\/)[A-Z]*")
In your case, if the URLs literally all begin with the same string https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/ then you can avoid regex entirely and use a simple substring to get the three-letter code which follows:
stringr::str_sub(url, 42, 44)
Here are the results:
> url <- "https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIL/1976.shtml"
>
> stringr::str_extract(url, "(?<=teams\\/)[A-Z]*")
[1] "MIL"
>
> stringr::str_sub(url, 42, 44)
[1] "MIL"
I have this variable
x= "379_exp_mirror1.csv"
I need to extract the number ("379") at the beggining (which doesn't always have 3 characters), i.e. everything before the first "". And then I need to extract everything between the second "" and the ".", in this case "mirror1".
I have tried several combinations with sub and gsub with no success, can anyone give me some indications please?
Thank you
You can use regular expression. For your problem ^(?<Number>[0-9]*)_.* do the job
1/ Test your regular expression with this website : http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/09/a-better-dotnet-regular-expression-tester.ashx
Or you can split string with underscore and then try parse (int.TryParse). I think the second is better but if you want to be a regular expression master try the first method
You can use sub to extract the substrings:
x <- "379_exp_mirror1.csv"
sub("_.*", "", x)
# [1] "379"
sub("^(?:.*_){2}(.*?)\\..*", "\\1", x)
# [1] "mirror1"
Another approach with gregexpr:
regmatches(x, gregexpr("^.*?(?=_)|(?<=_)[^_]*?(?=\\.)", x, perl = TRUE))[[1]]
# [1] "379" "mirror1"
May be you can try:
library(stringr)
x <- "379_exp_mirror1.csv"
str_extract_all(x, perl('^[0-9]+(?=_)|[[:alnum:]]+(?=\\.)'))[[1]]
#[1] "379" "mirror1"
Or
strsplit(x, "[._]")[[1]][c(T,F)]
#[1] "379" "mirror1"
Or
scan(text=gsub("[.]","_", x),what="",sep="_")[c(T,F)]
#Read 4 items
#[1] "379" "mirror1"