Thanks Gabor and Jim, Both solutions worked equally well for me (now I have an embarrassment of riches for a solution :-) ).
Now that my main problem is solved, I am happy, but I was wondering if anyone would care to comment as to why my 'strsplit' solution doesn't behave the way I think it should... Thank you both again, Matt On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 12:09 PM, Gabor Grothendieck < ggrothendi...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 12:53 PM, Matthew Pettis > <matthew.pet...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I have a dataframe that has a column of vectors that I need to extract > off > > the character string before the first '.' character and put it into a > > separate column. I thought I could use 'strsplit' for it within > > 'transform', but I can't seem to get the right invocation. Here is a > sample > > dataframe that has what I have, what I want, and what I get. Can someone > > tell me how to get what is in the 'want' column from the 'have' column > > programatically? > > > > tia, > > Matt > > > > df <- data.frame(have=c("a.b.c", "d.e.f", "g.h.i"), want=c("a","d","g")) > > df.xform <- transform(df, get=strsplit(as.character(have), split=".", > > fixed=TRUE)[[1]][1]) > > df.xform > > > > Try replacing the dot [.] and everything thereafter .* with nothing "" > like this: > > transform(df, want = sub("[.].*", "", have)) > > -- > Statistics & Software Consulting > GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc. > tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP > email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com > -- Seven Deadly Sins (Gandhi): - Wealth without work - Politics without principle - Pleasure without conscience - Commerce without morality - Science without humanity - Worship without sacrifice - Knowledge without character [[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.