How do I match the year such that it is general for the following examples.
a <- '"You Are There" (1953) {The Death of Socrates (399 B.C.) (#1.14)}'
b <- 'Þegar það gerist (1998/I) (TV)'
I have tried the following, but did not have the biggest success.
gsub('.+\\(([0-9]+.+\\)).?$', '\\1', a)
What I thought it did was to go until it finds a (, then it would make a group of numbers, then any character until it meets a ). And if there are several matches, I want to extract the first group.
Any suggestions to where I go wrong? I have been doing this in R.
Your pattern contains .+ parts that match 1 or more chars as many as possible, and at best your pattern could grab last 4 digit chunks from the incoming strings.
You may use
^.*?\((\d{4})(?:/[^)]*)?\).*
Replace with \1 to only keep the 4 digit number. See the regex demo.
Details
^ - start of string.*? - any 0+ chars as few as possible\( - a ( (\d{4}) - Group 1: four digits(?: - start of an optional non-capturing group
/ - a /[^)]* - any 0+ chars other than ))? - end of the group\) - a ) (OPTIONAL, MAY BE OMITTED).* - the rest of the string.See the R demo:
a <- c('"You Are There" (1953) {The Death of Socrates (399 B.C.) (#1.14)}', 'Þegar það gerist (1998/I) (TV)', 'Johannes Passion, BWV. 245 (1725 Version) (1996) (V)')
sub("^.*?\\((\\d{4})(?:/[^)]*)?\\).*", "\\1", a)
# => [1] "1953" "1998" "1996"
Another base R solution is to match the 4 digits after (:
regmatches(a, regexpr("\\(\\K\\d{4}(?=(?:/[^)]*)?\\))", a, perl=TRUE))
# => [1] "1953" "1998" "1996"
The \(\K\d{4} pattern matches ( and then drops it due to \K match reset operator and then a (?=(?:/[^)]*)?\\)) lookahead ensures there is an optional / + 0+ chars other than ) and then a ). Note that regexpr extracts the first match only.