How to move specific data from one column to another using r

Question

Im having a problem trying to move data from my address column to my postal code column. For example:

On the second line im trying to take "Dublin 22" from the data.Address column and moving it to the data.Postal.Code column.

Im using R but i have no idea how to implement it.

Any suggestions?

Please update your question and show several example addresses and where the postal code appears. — Tim Biegeleisen, Feb 13 '17 at 15:35
Welcome to SO. Please have a read at [how to ask a good question](http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask) and of course how to [make a reproducible example](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example). In addition, please add expected output as well as the code you have tried and failed. — Sotos, Feb 13 '17 at 15:35

Tim Biegeleisen · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-13T16:47:39.460

0

Try this:

data.Postal.Code <- gsub("^.*, (.*)$", "\\1", data.Address)

Update:

If you want to move Dublin 22 to the postal code column whenever it appears in the address then you can try the following:

data.Postal.Code[grepl("^.* Dublin 22$", data.Address)] <- "Dublin 22"

Here is a demo of the regex used:

Regex101

edited Feb 13 '17 at 16:47

answered Feb 13 '17 at 15:38

Tim Biegeleisen

2

You need to restrict it to `data.Postal.Code[data.Postal.Code == '']` – Sotos Feb 13 '17 at 15:40
@Sotos I interpreted his diagram as being a work in progress, but let me add this possible caviat. – Tim Biegeleisen Feb 13 '17 at 15:41
2

Actually, the blank entries could even be NA, we really don't know. – Tim Biegeleisen Feb 13 '17 at 15:44
Yeah, I was going to dupe it [with this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31774086/extracting-text-after-last-period-in-string-in-r) but wasn't sure – Sotos Feb 13 '17 at 15:45
Thanks Tim,That piece of code is inserting "Dublin 22" to every empty field in data.Postal.Code whereas i only want every row that has "Dublin 22" in the data.Address column to be moved to the data.Postal.Code column and so on. – Sean Mc Dermott Feb 13 '17 at 16:22
@SeanMcDermott I updated my answer and hopefully this is what you have in mind. – Tim Biegeleisen Feb 13 '17 at 16:49
Works perfect, appreciate it Tim. – Sean Mc Dermott Feb 14 '17 at 11:07