Extract Text Starting and Ending with Punctuations in R

Question

I want to extract a group of strings between two punctuations using RStudio.

I tried to use str_extract command, but whenever I tried to use anchors (^ for starting char, and $ for ending char), it failed.

Here is the sample problem:

> text <- "Name : Dr. CHARLES DOWNING MAP ; POB : London; Age/DOB : 53 years / August 05, 1958;"

Here is the sample code I used:

> str_extract(text,"(Name : )(.+)?( ;)")  
> str_match(str_extract(text,"(Name : )(.+)?( ;)"),"(Name : )(.+)?( ;)")[3]

But it seemed too verbose, and not flexible.

I only want to extract "Dr. CHARLES DOWNING MAP".

Anyone can help with my problem?

Can I tell the regex to start with any non-white-space character after "Name : " and ends before " ; POB"?

Answer 1

This seems to work.

> gsub(".*Name :(.*) ;.*", "\\1", text)
[1] " Dr. CHARLES DOWNING MAP"

Answer 2

With str_match

stringr::str_match(text, "^Name : (.*) ;")[, 2]
#[1] "Dr. CHARLES DOWNING MAP"

[, 2] is to get the contents from the capture group.

---

There is also qdapRegex::ex_between to extract string between left and right markers

qdapRegex::ex_between(text, "Name : ", ";")[[1]]
#[1] "Dr. CHARLES DOWNING MAP"