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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T13:10:43+00:00

If I have this data set Browser Count Chrome/11 100 Chrome/11 89 Chrome/13 10

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If I have this data set

Browser          Count
Chrome/11         100
Chrome/11         89
Chrome/13         10
Safari/12         40
Safari/114        30

And I want to get a more general form of the browser without the version number.

Browser          Clean_Browser       Count
Chrome/11         Chrome              100
Chrome/11         Chrome              89
Chrome/13         Chrome              10
Safari/12         Safari              40 
Safari/114        Safari              30

I know this is easy to do with python or excel, but is there a way to do it in R so I don’t have to pre-process the data?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    That is pretty straightforward thanks to the regular expressions as well as string processing — both are vectorised so you do not need to loop. You could use

    • gsub() et al and replace ‘/…’ with blanks

    • even use strsplit with ‘/’ as the split character and retain the first

    • certainly other ways I can’t think of now, and experience suggests several will involve packages by Hadley 🙂 [kidding aside, look at the stringr package too]

    Here is approach one, done on a vector but a column in a data.frame is just the same:

    R> vec <- c( paste("Chrome", 11:13, sep="/"), paste("Safari", 101:102, sep="/"))
R> vec
[1] "Chrome/11"  "Chrome/12"  "Chrome/13"  "Safari/101" "Safari/102"
R> newvec <- gsub("/.*$", "", vec, perl=TRUE)
R> newvec
[1] "Chrome" "Chrome" "Chrome" "Safari" "Safari"
R>
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