R help - Feb 2014 - Extracting everything between two symbols in a string

Hello,

I have a vector containing some names. I want to extract the title on 
every row, basically everything between the ", " (included the white 
space) and "."

     > head(combi$Name)
     [1] "Braund, Mr. Owen Harris"
     [2] "Cumings, Mrs. John Bradley (Florence Briggs Thayer)"
     [3] "Heikkinen, Miss. Laina"
     [4] "Futrelle, Mrs. Jacques Heath (Lily May Peel)"
     [5] "Allen, Mr. William Henry"
     [6] "Moran, Mr. James"

I suppose grep with the argument `value = TRUE` might come useful but I 
have difficulties on find the right regular expressions to accomplish my 
needs.

     combi$Title <- grep("", combi$Name, value = TRUE)

Many thanks,

Gianluca

Hello,

Try the following.

x <- "Braund, Mr. Owen Harris"
sub("^.*, (M[[:alpha:]]*)\\..*$", "\\1", x)


Hope this helps,

Rui Barradas

Em 16-02-2014 12:50, Gianluca Rossi escreveu:
> Hello,
>
> I have a vector containing some names. I want to extract the title on
> every row, basically everything between the ", " (included the
white
> space) and "."
>
>      > head(combi$Name)
>      [1] "Braund, Mr. Owen Harris"
>      [2] "Cumings, Mrs. John Bradley (Florence Briggs Thayer)"
>      [3] "Heikkinen, Miss. Laina"
>      [4] "Futrelle, Mrs. Jacques Heath (Lily May Peel)"
>      [5] "Allen, Mr. William Henry"
>      [6] "Moran, Mr. James"
>
> I suppose grep with the argument `value = TRUE` might come useful but I
> have difficulties on find the right regular expressions to accomplish my
> needs.
>
>      combi$Title <- grep("", combi$Name, value = TRUE)
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Gianluca
>
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