Extracting everything between two symbols in a string

gsub, r, regex

Solution

1) sub With `sub`

> sub(".*, ([^.]*)\\..*", "\\1", Name)
[1] "Mr"   "Mrs"  "Miss" "Mrs"  "Mr"   "Mr"

1a) sub variation This approach with `gsub` also works:

> sub(".*, |\\..*", "", Name)
[1] "Mr"   "Mrs"  "Miss" "Mrs"  "Mr"   "Mr"

2) strapplyc or using `strapplyc` in the gusbfn package it can be done with a simpler regular expression:

> library(gsubfn)
>
> strapplyc(Name, ", ([^.]*)\\.", simplify = TRUE)
[1] "Mr"   "Mrs"  "Miss" "Mrs"  "Mr"   "Mr"

2a) strapplyc variation This one seems to have the simplest regular expression of them all.

> library(gsubfn)
>
> sapply(strapplyc(Name, "\\w+"), "[", 2)
[1] "Mr"   "Mrs"  "Miss" "Mrs"  "Mr"   "Mr"

3) strsplit A third way is using `strsplit`

> sapply(strsplit(Name, ", |\\."), "[", 2)
[1] "Mr"   "Mrs"  "Miss" "Mrs"  "Mr"   "Mr"

Added additional solutions. Changed `gsub` to `sub` (although `gsub` works too).

Problem

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 `gsub` might come useful but I have difficulties on find the right regular expressions to accomplish my needs.

Original source