obtaining first word in the string [duplicate]

Answer 1

Your example is simple, for a more general case like

y<- c('london/hilss', 'newyork.hills', 'paris-jjk')

maybe following will do better?

stringr::str_extract(y, '\\w*')

Answer 2

This regex will also work fine.

Regex: ^[^\/]+

It will start matching from beginning of string until a / is found.

^ outside character class [] is anchor for beginning of string.

While ^ inside character class means negated character class.

Regex101 Demo

Answer 3

stringr::str_extract(a, '\\b*')

Answer 4

A very simple approach with gsub

gsub("/.*", '', y)
[1] "london"  "newyork" "paris"