Keep part of string after last sign.

Question

I would like to keep only the string after the last | sign in my rownames which looks like this: in:

"d__Bacteria|p__Proteobacteria|c__Gammaproteobacteria|o__Chromatiales|f__Woeseiaceae|g__Woeseia"

out:

g__Woeseia

I have this code which keeps everything from the start until a given sign:

gsub("^.*\\.",".",x)

Answer 1

We could do this by capturing as a group. Using sub, match characters (.*) until the | and capture zero or more characters that are not a | (([^|]*)) until the end ($) of the string and replace by the backreference (\\1) of the captured group

sub(".*\\|([^|]*)$", "\\1", str1)
#[1] "g__Woeseia"

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Or match characters until the | and replace it with blank ("")

sub(".*\\|", "", str1)
#[1] "g__Woeseia"

data

str1 <- "d__Bacteria|p__Proteobacteria|c__Gammaproteobacteria|o__Chromatiales|f__Woeseiaceae|g__Woeseia"