I have a vector (say "x") of the form
[1] "mung5" "mung10" "mung20" "gorp5" "gorp10" "gorp20"
I want to extract just the numbers (strings of digits) that appear at
the end of the strings in "x".
My reading of ?regex led me to believe that
gsub("[:alpha:]","",x)
should give the result that I want. However it returns
[1] "mung5" "mung10" "mung20" "gor5" "gor10" "gor20"
i.e. it chops the last letter out of the "gorp" string, but nothing else.
I am completely bewildered by this behaviour and can see no rationale
for it nor any way to adjust my syntax to get what I want.
A bit of Googling led me to the information that
gsub("\\D","",x)
should work, and indeed it does, giving:
[1] "5" "10" "20" "5" "10" "20"
OMMMMM! (Apparently "\D" means *not* a digit.)
So I have *a* solution to my problem. However I would really like to
know why the <expletive deleted> the first idea I tried did not work and
what it is actually *doing*!
Anybody?
cheers,
Rolf Turner
--
Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276
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