Remove numbers from alphanumeric characters

Question

I have a list of alphanumeric characters that looks like:

x <-c('ACO2', 'BCKDHB456', 'CD444')

I would like the following output:

x <-c('ACO', 'BCKDHB', 'CD')

score 113 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 05 '15 at 09:06

113

You can use gsub for this:

gsub('[[:digit:]]+', '', x)

or

gsub('[0-9]+', '', x)
# [1] "ACO"    "BCKDHB" "CD"

edited Oct 05 '15 at 09:06

sideshowbarker

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answered Nov 27 '12 at 17:56

Justin

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score 16 · Answer 2 · edited Sep 01 '21 at 20:40

16

If your goal is just to remove numbers, then the removeNumbers() function removes numbers from a text. Using it reduces the risk of mistakes.

library(tm)

x <-c('ACO2', 'BCKDHB456', 'CD444') 

x <- removeNumbers(x)

x

[1] "ACO"    "BCKDHB" "CD"

edited Sep 01 '21 at 20:40

AndrewGB

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answered May 31 '17 at 19:09

Cleonidas

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Please format your answer and provide information about how your answer is better than the ones that were already posted. Also: Just code usually isn't enough. Can you explain what your solution does? – Noel Widmer May 31 '17 at 19:27

score 15 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 05 '20 at 15:14

15

Using stringr

Most stringr functions handle regex

str_replace_all will do what you need

str_replace_all(c('ACO2', 'BCKDHB456', 'CD444'), "[:digit:]", "")

answered Feb 05 '20 at 15:14

D Bolta

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This is probably the best answer for most people. – Andrew Brēza Feb 14 '20 at 13:43
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str_remove_all from stringr would do this identically without needing the 3rd argument – MBorg Jun 26 '22 at 07:36

score 6 · Answer 4 · edited Apr 27 '17 at 13:07

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A solution using stringi:

# your data
x <-c('ACO2', 'BCKDHB456', 'CD444')

# extract capital letters
x <- stri_extract_all_regex(x, "[A-Z]+")

# unlist, so that you have a vector
x <- unlist(x)

Solution in one line:

edited Apr 27 '17 at 13:07

Jaap

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answered Oct 07 '16 at 09:27

altabq

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Is a nice solution, however I have state names with footnotes (that I want to remove) and by "District of Columbia" I get three character values instead of one. Due to this my output vector is much longer than my input vector. Ideas how to fix this? – N.Varela Feb 24 '17 at 21:22
You could use [this solution](http://stackoverflow.com/a/5412122/2254210), which is going to work for every state but DC, because it's not a state. You'd have to add DC to the `state.abb` and `state.name` vectors manually. – altabq Feb 25 '17 at 16:50

Remove numbers from alphanumeric characters

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