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rregexstringreplacecharacter

How to remove all characters that lie between blanks (white spaces) in R string?

Suppose you have a character string "The Big Dog" and you would like to remove all characters that lie between the blanks (white spaces), so you end up with "The Dog". Note that in the actual code the "Big" is dynamic and the string between the white spaces can be formed by different sequences of continuous characters, so searching/replacing for "Big" is not a solution. How would this be done, preferably in base R but as second choice using stringr package?

Here is my futile attempt in base R:

test <- c("The Big Dog")
test1 <- sub(" " ".*" " ", "", test)
Solution 
  • test <- c("The Big Dog", "A Giant and Enormous Dog")
sub(" .* ", " ", test)
#[1] "The Dog" "A Dog"