Question

If I have a string and want to split on the last digit and keep the last part of the split hpw can I do that?

x <- c("ID", paste0("X", 1:10, state.name[1:10]))

I’d like

 [1] NA            "Alabama"     "Alaska"      "Arizona"     "Arkansas"   
 [6] "California"  "Colorado"    "Connecticut" "Delaware"    "Florida"    
[11] "Georgia"    

But would settle for:

 [1] "ID"          "Alabama"     "Alaska"      "Arizona"     "Arkansas"   
 [6] "California"  "Colorado"    "Connecticut" "Delaware"    "Florida"    
[11] "Georgia"    

I can get the first part by:

unlist(strsplit(x, "[^0-9]*$"))

But want the second part.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

library(stringr)
unlist(lapply(str_split(x, "[0-9]"), tail,n=1))

gives

[1] "ID"          "Alabama"     "Alaska"      "Arizona"     "Arkansas"    "California"  "Colorado"    "Connecticut" "Delaware"   
[10] "Florida"     "Georgia"

I would look at the documentation stringr for (most possibly) an even better approach.