Question

I have a vector of strings:

v.string <- c('abc', 'beb', 'lol', 'heh', 'hah')

Is there a way of extracting the first N elements from the vector? So in the above if I want to extract the first 2, i will get:

'ab','be','lo','he','ha'

Or do I have to do a loop and use substr function? My vector is rather long.

Thanks

Answer 1

you are looking for ?substr

 substr( v.string , start = 1 , stop = 2 )

(incorporating @Arun’s comment) if you want to start at the second-to-last letters, you might also use the nchar function, so

# print the number of characters in each string in your character vector..
nchar( v.string ) 

# ..which gets used to..

# print the second-to-last character until the end of the string
substr( v.string , start = nchar( v.string ) - 1 , stop = nchar( v.string ) )