Extract first word

Question

I have the following data frame dat :

brand (column name)
Channel clothes
Gucci perfume
Channel shoes
LV purses
LV scarves

And I want to cr

Answer 1

I prefer the tidyverse approach.

With this dataset:

library(tidyverse)

df <- tribble(
  ~brand,
  "Channel clothes",
  "Gucci perfume",
  "Channel shoes",
  "LV purses",
  "LV scarves"
)

We can separate the column with the following:

df %>% 
  separate(brand, into = c("brand", "item"), sep = " ")

Which returns:

# A tibble: 5 x 2
    brand    item
*   <chr>   <chr>
1 Channel clothes
2   Gucci perfume
3 Channel   shoes
4      LV  purses
5      LV scarves

Answer 2

We can use the word from stringr

library(stringr)
word(df$brand, 1)
#[1] "Channel" "Gucci"   "Channel" "LV"      "LV"     

Answer 3

This should do it.

dat <- data.frame(Brand = c('Channel clothes',
                           'Gucci perfume',
                           'Channel shoes',
                           'LV purses',
                           'LV scarves'))
brand <- sub('(^\\w+)\\s.+','\\1',dat$Brand)
#[1] "Channel" "Gucci"   "Channel" "LV"      "LV"