I am working on the following problem in R
[ Note: I realize that there is an answer posted to a similar question which is
How do I get the length of the first line in a multi line string?
however I am looking for a solution in R, not in python. ]
Suppose I have a string on multiple lines such as the one below:
"The first line of the string,
the second line of the string
and finally the the third line of the string."
I would like to know the length of just the first line of the string which is:
> nchar("The first line of the string,")
[1] 29
However the string is really stored as
> "The first line of the string,
+ the second line of the string
+ and finally the the third line of the string"
[1] "The first line of the string,\nthe second line of the string\nand finally the the third line of the string"
So when I apply the nchar function to the entire string, I get
> my_string = "The first line of the string,
+ the second line of the string
+ and finally the the third line of the string"
> nchar(my_string)
[1] 104
which is not correct.
Is there a way I can get the number of characters on just the first line?
You can use sub to remove everything after \n and use then nchar.
nchar(sub("\n.*", "", my_string))
#[1] 29
or using strsplit
nchar(strsplit(my_string, "\n")[[1]][1])
#nchar(strsplit(my_string, "\n")[[c(1,1)]]) #Alternative
#[1] 29