r remove character before space in a string

Question

I have a column within a dataframe where some values are like this

I am looking for a way to remove only those Y prior to those strings that have Y and some characters separated by a space ( Y 183.21, Y 428.29 ) . Not the Y that is not separated by the space (Y500) but only Ys that are separated by space ( Y 183.21, Y 428.29 ). The expected output would be

I tried some examples but unsuccessful. Any advice or tips are much appricated.

It looks like you have two variables in one. I'd extract the `Y`s into a new column (maybe `grepl('Y\\d', df$Col1)`), and parse to an actual number with `readr::parse_number(df$Col1)`. Or you could get creative with `tidyr::separate` and lookarounds. — alistaire, Dec 09 '16 at 04:33

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 09 '16 at 04:10

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We can use package stringi

library(stringi)

new.df<-stri_replace_all(df,"" ,fixed = "Y " )

answered Dec 09 '16 at 04:10

MFR

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Great use of `stri_replace_all` Plus one – akrun Dec 09 '16 at 05:01

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 09 '16 at 04:13

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We can use sub assuming you have only one match

sub("Y ", "", df$Col1)

#[1] "183.21" "500.23" "432.89" "428.29" "Y500"

answered Dec 09 '16 at 04:13

Ronak Shah

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r remove character before space in a string

2 Answers2