Dear all,
I have a dataframe of names (netw), with each cell including last name and
initials of an author; some cells have NA. I would like to extract only the
last name from each cell; this new dataframe is calle 'res'
Here is what I do:
res <- data.frame(matrix(NA, nrow=dim(netw)[1], ncol=dim(netw)[2]))
for (i in 1:x)
{
wh <- regexpr('[a-z]{3,}', as.character(netw[,i]))
res[i] <- substring(as.character(netw[,i]), wh, wh + attr(wh,'match.length')-1)
}
the problem is that I cannot manage to extract 'complex' names properly such as
' van der hoops bf ': here I only get 'van', the real last name is 'van der
hoops' and 'bf' are the initials. Basically the last name has always a minimum
of 3 consecutive letters, but may have 3 or more letters separated by one or
more space; the cell may start by a space too; initials never have more than 2
letters.
Someone would have a nice idea for that? Thanks,
David
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