You can do this with regular expressions, since you want to extract specific values from the string I would suggest learning about the gsubfn package, it is a bit easier with gsubfn than with the other matching tools.
-- Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. Statistical Data Center Intermountain Healthcare greg.s...@imail.org 801.408.8111 > -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces@r- > project.org] On Behalf Of D. Alain > Sent: Friday, February 04, 2011 5:33 AM > To: r-help@r-project.org > Subject: [R] recode according to specific sequence of characters within > a string variable > > Dear R-List, > > I have a dataframe with one column "name.of.report" containing > character values, e.g. > > > >df$name.of.report > > "jeff_2001_teamx" > "teamy_jeff_2002" > "robert_2002_teamz" > "mary_2002_teamz" > "2003_mary_teamy" > ... > (i.e. the bit of interest is not always at same position) > > Now I want to recode the column "name.of.report" into the variables > "person", "year","team", like this > > >new.df > > "person" "year" "team" > jeff 2001 x > jeff 2002 y > robert 2002 z > mary 2002 z > > I tried with grep() > > df$person<-grep("jeff",df$name.of.report) > > but of course it didn't exactly result in what I wanted to do. Could > not find any solution via RSeek. Excuse me if it is a very silly > question, but can anyone help me find a way out of this? > > Thanks a lot > > Alain > > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.