Remove the string before a certain word with R

Question

I have a character vector that I need to clean. Specifically, I want to remove the number that comes before the word \"Votes.\" Note that the number has a comma to separate thou

Answer 1

Easiest way is with stringr:

> library(stringr)
> regexp <- "-?[[:digit:]]+\\.*,*[[:digit:]]*\\.*,*[[:digit:]]* Votes+"
> str_extract(text,regexp)
[1] "558,586 Votes"

To do the same thing but extract only the number, wrap it in gsub:

> gsub('\\s+[[:alpha:]]+', '', str_extract(text,regexp))
[1] "558,586"

Here's a version that will strip out all numbers before the word "Votes" even if they have commas or periods in it:

> gsub('\\s+[[:alpha:]]+', '', unlist(regmatches (text,gregexpr("-?[[:digit:]]+\\.*,*[[:digit:]]*\\.*,*[[:digit:]]* Votes+",text) )) )
[1] "558,586"

If you want the label too, then just throw out the gsub part:

> unlist(regmatches (text,gregexpr("-?[[:digit:]]+\\.*,*[[:digit:]]*\\.*,*[[:digit:]]* Votes+",text) )) 
[1] "558,586 Votes"

And if you want to pull out all the numbers:

> unlist(regmatches (text,gregexpr("-?[[:digit:]]+\\.*,*[[:digit:]]*\\.*,*[[:digit:]]*",text) ))
[1] "1"       "15"      "202"     "558,586"