Extract 3 first numbers from 6 numbers from character string

Question

I have some issues while working with text stings in R.

I have some string vector which consists of, combined, characters and numbers:

> a <- c("China ltd 123100","Morocco125312 Ytd")
> a

[1] "China ltd 123100"  "Morocco125312 Ytd"

The thing is that every element of a contains a sequence of 6 numbers and I need to extract first 3 numbers of every sequence.

Output should be:

[1] "123"  "125"

I need to do this with basic R functions since I am not able to install packages. Can you please help me, have no ideas how to do this.

Since you can't use packages adding this as a comment `stringr::str_extract(a, '\\d{3}')` — Ronak Shah, Jul 21 '20 at 14:35

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 21 '20 at 14:08

2

Maybe you can try gsub like below

> gsub("\\D+(\\d{3}).*","\\1",a)
[1] "123" "125"

answered Jul 21 '20 at 14:08

ThomasIsCoding

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 21 '20 at 13:59

0

This could help:

substring(text = as.numeric(gsub("[^\\d]+", "", a, perl=TRUE)),first = 1,last = 3)

[1] "123" "125"

answered Jul 21 '20 at 13:59

Duck

This way of extracting the numbers is a bit long-winded, but it isn't so bad that it is deserving of downvotes. – alex_danielssen Jul 21 '20 at 14:48

2 Answers2