Extract first N digits from a string

Question

I want to extract just FIRST TWO DIGITS from some strings. Suppose the data is :

ABC Conference Room Monitor - Z5580J    
ABC 19 Monitor    
ABC 24 Monitor f         


        

Answer 1

Another solution:

strings <- c('ABC Conference Room Monitor - Z5580J','ABC 19 Monitor','ABC 24 Monitor for Video-Conferencing','ABC UltraSharp 24 Monitor -QU2482Z')
x <- as.numeric(gsub("\\D", "", strings))
as.numeric(substring(as.character(x*100), 1, 2))

[1] 55 19 24 24

Answer 2

One solution with stringr is:

library(stringr)
string <- str_extract_all("ABC Conference Room Monitor - Z5580J","\\(?[0-9,.]+\\)?")[[1]]
# "\\(?[0-9,.]+\\)?" is the regex, extracts only numbers
as.numeric(substr(string , 1,2)) # this selects the first two elements
#as.numeric is optional

Answer 3

Solution using regex \\D to match non-digit characters and \\d{2} to match first two digits.

as.numeric(sub("\\D*(\\d{2}).*", "\\1", INPUT))
# [1] 55 19 24 24

data:

INPUT <- c("ABC Conference Room Monitor - Z5580J",
           "ABC 19 Monitor",
           "ABC 24 Monitor for Video-Conferencing",
           "ABC UltraSharp 24 Monitor -QU2482Z")

Answer 4

Package stringr perhaps allows for the cleanest solution:

stringr::str_extract(string, "\\d{2}")
 "55" "19" "24" "24"