Hi, You could try: as.numeric(gsub(".*[(]([0-9]+)[)]","\\1",aa)) #[1] 472 445 431 431 415 405 1 #or
library(gsubfn) strapply(aa,"[(]([0-9]+)[)]",as.numeric,simplify=TRUE) #[1] 472 445 431 431 415 405 1 A.K. On Sunday, March 2, 2014 2:57 PM, "Doran, Harold" <hdo...@air.org> wrote: Suppose I have a character vector as follows: > aa [1] "1 (472)" "2 (445)" "3 (431)" "3 (431)" "5 (415)" "6 (405)" "7 (1)” I want to extract the values within parentheses and place them into a column that is numeric. The values in aa vary in length and so using strsplit() won’t work because the positions change. Is there are better pattern matching function that I can use to grab values from within the parentheses? [[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. ______________________________________________ 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.