How to drop strings based on element length in R Data frame?

Question

I have a data frame df , and it has few columns & it contains text . I want to drop all elements if their length is less than 4 characters.What I expect is expected_df . Reproducible example is given below .

df<-data.frame(client=c("My Name is abcdff","Name is not right","Bangalore is getting hoter","BBa wasa school topper"),serial_numer=c(1:4))


expected_df<-data.frame(client=c("Name abcdff","Name right","Bangalore getting hoter","wasa school topper"),serial_numer=c(1:4))

This is what I have tried to solve my problem

df$client<-as.character(df$client)
df$client[nchar(df$client) > 3]

`library(stringr) df$client <- as.character(df$client) df$client <- sapply(df$client, function(x) { l <- unlist(strsplit(x, " ")) l <- l[str_length(l) >= 4 ] paste(l, collapse = " ") }, USE.NAMES = F) df ` — Sonny, Mar 12 '19 at 09:07

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 12 '19 at 09:04

We can split the string and count number of characters in individual words and select only the ones which are greater than equal to 4.

df$client <- sapply(strsplit(as.character(df$client), "\\s+"), function(x) 
                paste0(x[nchar(x) >= 4], collapse = " "))

df
#                   client serial_numer
#1             Name abcdff            1
#2              Name right            2
#3 Bangalore getting hoter            3
#4      wasa school topper            4

How to drop strings based on element length in R Data frame?

1 Answers1