Question

I need to write a basic regular expression in R that I cannot figure out. What I am trying to do is to remove the number and space from the data, so that “Flagstaff 24” becomes “Flagstaff”.

library(stringr)

data <- c("Flagstaff 24",  "Los Angeles 23", "Cleveland 29", "Cleveland 29",  "Seattle 22")    

However as my numbers are either one or two digits I cannot just trim the end. What I have tried are the following expressions that do not work:

str_split_fixed(data, ".\\d", 1)

I’m trying to wrap my head around these expression structures!

Answer 1

You can just use gsub() for this. (No need for the stringr package.)

gsub("\\s*\\d*$", "", data)
[1] "Flagstaff"   "Los Angeles" "Cleveland"   "Cleveland"   "Seattle"