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string remove pattern with special character in R

I have an object in R called text :

text = c(" - John - Loves Helen - Day 4")

I want to remove the starting space the "-" and the space (i.e) all the special characters before the first word.

ideally I want to the result to be :

John - Loves Helen - Day 4

please take into account that in my real data set the column with text might contain different starting word (i.e different from John).

How can I do that in R ?

Solution

  • This should work:

    text = c(" - John - Loves Helen - Day 4") 

text.split <- unlist(strsplit(text,split = " "))

text.split <- text.split[-c(1,2)]

text.split <- paste(text.split,collapse = " ")

print(text.split)

"John - Loves Helen - Day 4"

    This also works and is neater:

    text <- sub("^\\W*","",text)

print(text)

"John - Loves Helen - Day 4"

    Hope it helps!