Question

I need to pick up some numbers from lines with irregular length, like this:

AAAAAAAAA 250.00
BBB 240.00
CCCCCCC 13.00

I need to capture 250.00, 240.00 and 13.00, but since both the numeric and character strings are irregular, I can’t use “substr” for that, I think regex maybe the solution, but I dunno much about it.

Can anyone help? Thanks!

EDIT #1

Thanks for Joshua’s speedy reply, but I’m afraid it is not exactly the case, as space and numbers may also present in AAAAAAAA, BBB, CCCCC strings.

Thanks again.

EDIT #2

Joshua I’ve tried, but still fail, I’ll show a sample of the line here:

 01 JUN 2003 02 JUN 2002 OCTOPUS CARDS LTD HONG KONG HK 250.00

Hope it helps, and thanks again.

EDIT #3

Joshua thanks again.

Now I have a more complicated case:

 01 JUN 2003 02 JUN 2002 OCTOPUS CARDS LTD HONG KONG HK 834591283405347 250.00

The “OCTOPUS CARDS LTD HONG KONG HK” AND “834591283405347” are two separate columns and I want to extract them also, how can I do that?

Answer 1

If your actual problem is like your example:

> lapply(c("AAAAAAA 250.00","BBB 240.00"), function(x) strsplit(x, " ")[[1]][2]) 
[[1]]
[1] "250.00"

[[2]]
[1] "240.00"

EDIT 1: Since your actual problem isn’t exactly like your example: 😉

> y <- c("AAAAAAAAAAA 250.00","BBBBB 240.00","CC CC 120.00")
> FUN <- function(x) substr(x,regexpr("[0-9]",x),nchar(x))
> lapply(y,FUN)
[[1]]
[1] "250.00"

[[2]]
[1] "240.00"

[[3]]
[1] "120.00"

EDIT 2:
Change FUN to:

> FUN <- function(x) tail(strsplit(x," ")[[1]],1)