Remove characters in string before specific symbol(including it)

Question

at the beginning, yes - simillar questions are present here, however the solution doesn't work as it should - at least for me.

I'd like to remove all characters, letters and numbers with any combination before first semicolon, and also remove it too.

So we have some strings:

x <- "1;ABC;GEF2"
y <- "X;EER;3DR"

Let's do so gsub() with . and * which means any symbol with occurance 0 or more:

gsub(".*;", "", x)
gsub(".*;", "", y)

And as a result i get:

[1] "GEF2"
[1] "3DR"

But I'd like to have:

[1] "ABC;GEF2"
[1] "EER;3DR"

Why did it 'catch' second occurence of semicolon instead of first?

`sub("^.*?;", "", x)`, 1. sub 2. use non-greedy – Avinash Raj Nov 08 '17 at 09:07 — Avinash Raj, Nov 08 '17 at 09:07
Try with `sub` i.e. `sub("^[^;]*;", "", x)` – akrun Nov 08 '17 at 09:07 — akrun, Nov 08 '17 at 09:07
Each solution works great, thanks a lot! – Adamm Nov 08 '17 at 09:36 — Adamm, Nov 08 '17 at 09:36

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 08 '17 at 09:12

2

You could use

gsub("[^;]*;(.*)", "\\1", x)
# [1] "ABC;GEF2"

answered Nov 08 '17 at 09:12

Jan

1 Answers1