split string and concatenating to remove a portion of string

Question

I am trying to remove a portion of a string. The best I can come up with is to strsplit and then concatenate (maybe there is an easier way.

list<-as.character(c("joe_joe_ID1000", "bob_bob_ID20000"))
list<-strsplit(list, "_")

I would like my output to be "joe joe" and "bob bob" but I am unclear on how to concatenate the resulting strsplit list. And perhaps there is an even easier way Thanks.

Answer 1

Using sapply() and paste() you can do this:

sapply(list, function(x) paste(x[1:2], collapse = " "))
[1] "joe joe" "bob bob"

Or something more akin to akrun's solution but slightly different:

c("joe_joe_ID1000", "bob_bob_ID20000") %>% 
  sub("[^_]*$", " ", .) %>%
  gsub("_", " ", ., fixed = TRUE) %>%
  trimws()
[1] "joe joe" "bob bob"

Original data:

list<-as.character(c("joe_joe_ID1000", "bob_bob_ID20000"))
list<-strsplit(list, "_")