I want to extract a name field from a text eg
name = "My name is John Smith"
should return John Smith
My current code is
grep(".^[A-Z][a-z]+\\s[A-Z][a-z]+", name, value = TRUE)
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1Can you give more sample input data? – Tim Biegeleisen Feb 19 '18 at 08:37
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related: [regex](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4736/learning-regular-expressions) – jogo Feb 19 '18 at 08:46
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Remove `.^` from your pattern and see if it works for you. – ndnenkov Feb 19 '18 at 09:02
1 Answers
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We can use sub to capture the words that start with uppercase, followed by lower case, then a space followed by the word with upper case, lower case letters of the string followed by other characters (.*) and replace with the backreference (\\1) of the captured group
sub(".*([A-Z][a-z]+\\s[A-Z][a-z]+).*", "\\1", name)
#[1] "John Smith"
edit: added @DJack's recommendation
data
name <- c("My name is John Smith")
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1To cover more cases, in particular when the name is in the middle of the text, you may want to replace `$` by `.*` – DJack Feb 19 '18 at 08:50