R help - Mar 2012 - Remove a word from a character vector value XXXX

Hi everyone,

What is the easiest way to remove the word Average and strip leading
and trailing blanks from the character vector (d5.Region) below?

.nrow.d5.           d5.Region
1            1     Central Average
2            2     Coastal Average
3            3        East Average
4            4  Metro East Average
5            5 Metro North Average
6            6 Metro South Average
7            7  Metro West Average
8            8   Northeast Average
9            9   Northwest Average


Thanks!

Dan

Hadley's package stringr is wonderful for all things string.

library(stringr)

?str_trim

and

?str_replace are what you want.  (the base R equivalent of these two
would be ?gsub and some regular expressions)

str_trim(str_replace(d5.Region, 'Average', ''))

should do the trick.

hope that helps,
Justin


On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 8:03 AM, Dan Abner <dan.abner99 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> What is the easiest way to remove the word Average and strip leading
> and trailing blanks from the character vector (d5.Region) below?
>
> .nrow.d5. ? ? ? ? ? d5.Region
> 1 ? ? ? ? ? ?1 ? ? Central Average
> 2 ? ? ? ? ? ?2 ? ? Coastal Average
> 3 ? ? ? ? ? ?3 ? ? ? ?East Average
> 4 ? ? ? ? ? ?4 ?Metro East Average
> 5 ? ? ? ? ? ?5 Metro North Average
> 6 ? ? ? ? ? ?6 Metro South Average
> 7 ? ? ? ? ? ?7 ?Metro West Average
> 8 ? ? ? ? ? ?8 ? Northeast Average
> 9 ? ? ? ? ? ?9 ? Northwest Average
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> Dan
>
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On Mar 7, 2012, at 11:03 AM, Dan Abner wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> What is the easiest way to remove the word Average and strip leading
> and trailing blanks from the character vector (d5.Region) below?
>
> .nrow.d5.           d5.Region
> 1            1
> 2            2     Coastal Average
> 3            3        East Average
> 4            4  Metro East Average
> 5            5 Metro North Average
> 6            6 Metro South Average
> 7            7  Metro West Average
> 8            8   Northeast Average
> 9            9   Northwest Average
>
Not sure which leading or trailing spaces you mean. Once cannot infer  
such structure from console output.  Provide a reproducible example  
with dput() if you want better answers.

 > sub( "\\s+Average.+$", "", "Central    Average
junk  ")
[1] "Central"

This would strip space before 'Average' and anything after it.

-- 

David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT