See ?regexpr to get the position; however, using sub we could remove the dot and everything after it in one go. See ?regexp and ?sub . Also there are some links to info on regular expressions in the Links box on this page: http://gsubfn.googlecode.com
> n <- regexpr(".", "apples.pears", fixed = TRUE) > substr("apples.pear", 1, n-1) [1] "apples" > sub("[.].*", "", "apples.pears") [1] "apples" On 8/25/07, Mitchell Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This is a very simple question, so I apologize I couldn't find it online: > > I want to shorten the string 'apples.pears' to 'apples'. > > string='apples.pears' > string1=substr(string,0,x) > > For x above, I would like to have a command like charAt(string,"."), i.e. > the position of the period in the word, but I can't seem to find a charAt > command in R. > > Thank you. > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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. > ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.