I want to remove text before first

Question

I want text after first tag and later remove in remaining part of text.

x=data.frame(text=c("Hi John, hope you are doing well.< br/ >Let me know, when we can meet? < br/ > I have lot to talk about")

Expected output:

"Let me know, when we can meet? I have lot to talk about"

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 30 '19 at 15:07

Note that in general it is not ideal to be using regex to parse HTML content. Since your content is not nested, it might be reliable here, and we can try doing this with two calls to sub:

text <- "Hi John, hope you are doing well.< br/ >Let me know, when we can meet? < br/ > I have lot to talk about"
sub("< br/ >\\s*", "", sub(".*?< br/ >(.*)", "\\1", text))

[1] "Let me know, when we can meet? I have lot to talk about"

The inner call to sub first removes the leading portion of text up to, and including, the first   tag. Then, the second call to sub strips away all remaining   tags.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 30 '19 at 15:13

A non-regex answer would be to split on " " and collect all the terms except the first one and paste them together.

sapply(strsplit(as.character(x$text), "< br/ >"),
          function(x) paste0(x[-1], collapse = ""))
#[1] "Let me know, when we can meet?  I have lot to talk about"

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 30 '19 at 15:22

Another less efficient approach with gsub:

res1<-gsub("< br/ >|\\s{1,}(?<=\\n)","",gsub(".*(?=Let)","",x$text,perl=TRUE),perl=TRUE)
gsub("  ","",res1,perl=TRUE)

This removes the space before I:

[1] "Let me know,when we can meet?I have lot to talk about

akrun · Answer 4 · 2019-03-30T16:26:13.700

We can use str_extract_all to extract all text that occurs after the pattern ( ) and is not a <

library(stringr)
paste(str_extract_all(x$text, "(?<=< br/ >)[^<]+")[[1]], collapse="")
#[1] "Let me know, when we can meet?  I have lot to talk about"

Or another option is to replace the   with a delimiter, read with read.csv/read.table and paste

do.call(paste0, read.csv(text = gsub("< br/ >", ";", x$text, 
  fixed = TRUE), header = FALSE, sep=";", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)[-1])
#[1] "Let me know, when we can meet?  I have lot to talk about"

I want to remove text before first

4 Answers4