I have a text processing problem I'm hoping someone can help me solve. This issue it this.
I have a character string in which I need to delete a variable number of characters from the string. The string itself contains the number of characters to be deleted. The number of characters to be deleted is proceeded by either a "+" or a "-". A toy example: Suppose I have x<-c("A-1CB-2GHX", "*+11gAgggTgtgggH") > x [1] "A-1CB-2GHX" "*+11gAgggTgtgggH" What I need as output is "ABX" "*H" I know I can use gsub to remove the control character and the number portion with gsub("(\\-|\\+)([0-9]+)", replacement="", x) However, I can't figure out how to delete the variable number of characters after the number portion of the string. Any ideas? In case this helps > sessionInfo() R version 2.11.1 (2010-05-31) x86_64-pc-mingw32 locale: [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 [2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252 [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 [4] LC_NUMERIC=C [5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252 Brian [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.