I need to split and obtain the all the characters before ^
example: I have a column in a dataframe that reads
2567543^ABC
7545435^J
8934939^XY
and the result column in the same dataframe should read:
2567543
7545435
8934939
I tried using stringr, strsub{base}, stringi, gsubfn. But they are throwing weird results because ^. I cannot replace ^ because the table is simply huge.
Just remove all the chars from ^ upto the last using sub function. Since ^ is a special meta charcater in regex which matches the start of a line, you need to escape ^ symbol in-order to match a literal ^ symbol.
sub("\\^.*", "", df$x)
Example:
> df <- data.frame(x=c("2567543^ABC", "7545435^J", "8934939^XY"))
> df$x <- sub("\\^.*", "", df$x)
> df
x
1 2567543
2 7545435
3 8934939
OR
> df <- data.frame(x=c("2567543^ABC", "7545435^J", "8934939^XY"))
> df$x <- strsplit(as.character(df$x), "\\^")[[1]][1]
> df
x
1 2567543
2 2567543
3 2567543
OR
Use fixed=TRUE parameter in strsplit since ^ is a special character.
> df <- data.frame(x=c("2567543^ABC", "7545435^J", "8934939^XY"))
> df$x <- strsplit(as.character(df$x), "^", fixed=TRUE)[[1]][1]
> df
x
1 2567543
2 2567543
3 2567543
