Thank you all for the help, specially Gabor that is exactly what I needed. A few examples that do the same thing is very helpful in understanding the structure of the call.
Thank you again, Jean On Thu, 23 Sep 2004, Gabor Grothendieck wrote: > Jean Eid <jeaneid <at> chass.utoronto.ca> writes: > > : > : Hi > : > : A while back I used gsub to do the following > : > : temp<-"000US00231" > : gsub("something here", "", temp) > : "00231" > : > : I think it involved the `meta characters' somehow. > : > : I do not know how to do this anymore. I know strsplit will also work but I > : remember gsub was much faster. In essence the question is how to delete > : all characters before a particular pattern. > : > : If anyone has some help file for this, it will be greatly appreciated. > : > > I think you want sub in this case, not gsub. > > There are many possibilities here depending on what the > general case is. The following all give the desired > result for the example but their general cases differ. > These are just some of the numerous variations possible. > > temp<-"000US00231" > sub(".*US", "", temp) > sub(".*S", "", temp) > sub("[[:digit:]]*[[:alpha:]]*", "", temp) > sub(".*[[:alpha:]]", "", temp) > sub(".*[[:alpha:]][[:alpha:]]", "", temp) > sub(".*[[:upper:]]", "", temp) > sub(".*[[:upper:]][[:upper:]]", "", temp) > sub(".....", "", temp) > substring(temp, 6) > > ______________________________________________ > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html