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Remove all characters in a string after a “.” in R

I have a group of strings in a column like this

Group1
Group1.1
Group1.2
Group1.3


Group1
Group1.1
Group1.2
Group1.3

I want to remove all characters after the decimal point so it looks like this

Group1
Group1
Group1

Group1
Group1
Group1

How do I do this in R code? Thank you

2 Answers
2

We can use sub to match the dot (\. - escape it as it is a metacharacter specifying any character) followed by other characters (.*) until the end ($) of the string and replace it with blank ("")

sub

\.

.*

$

""

df1$Col <- sub("\..*$", "", df1$Col)
df1$Col
#[1] "Group1" "Group1" "Group1" "Group1"


df1 <- structure(list(Col = c("Group1", "Group1.1", "Group1.2", "Group1.3"
)), .Names = "Col", class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -4L
))


.*

.

Following may also help you here.

sub("([^\.]*)\..*","\1",df1$Col)


Output will be as follows.

[1] "Group1" "Group1" "Group1" "Group1"


test Data is:

df1 <- structure(list(Col = c("Group1", "Group1.1", "Group1.2", "Group1.3"
)), .Names = "Col", class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -4L
))


Explanation: Adding explanation of above code(only for explanation purposes).

sub( ##Using sub function of R here.
"([^\.]*) ##BY mentioning () means creating a place in memory to hold the matched regex's value, in here it will be from starting to till DOT comes.
\..*", ##Now mentioning DOT \ is for escaping the DOT to be meant from its special value and .* means till end of the value of data frame.
"\1", ##replace the complete value of data frame with first memory place which will be value before DOT.
df1$Col) ##Mentioning dataframe df1's col value here.


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