Split vector of strings and paste subset of resulting elements into a new vector

Question

Define

z<- as.character(c(\"1_xx xx xxx_xxxx_12_sep.xls\",\"2_xx xx xxx_xxxx_15_aug.xls\"))

such that

> z
[1] \"1_xx xx x         


        

Answer 1

You can do this using a combination of strsplit, substr and lapply:

y <- strsplit(z,"_",fixed=TRUE)
lapply(y,FUN=function(x){paste(x[1],x[4],substr(x[5],1,3),sep="_")})