Hi, This answer is predicated on the assumption that you are using "list" in its English sense.
## character vector with the names x <- c("Steve Young*", "Joe Montana*", "Tom Brady", "Daunte Culpepper") ## using grepl() and taking advantage of how logical data is stored to get 0/1 data as.numeric(grepl("\\*$", x)) See ?regexp for more details on regular expressions, ?grepl and ?TRUE for documentation on logical values Hope this helps, Josh On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 11:06 PM, jwehr <jglandw...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have a list of names that look like this, with some ending in an "*" and > others not: > > Steve Young* > Joe Montana* > Tom Brady > Daunte Culpepper > ... > > I want to create a variable that = 1 if the name ends in "*" and = 0 > otherwise. Please help! > > -- > View this message in context: > http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Extract-character-from-the-end-of-a-string-tp3621732p3621732.html > Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > ______________________________________________ > 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. > -- Joshua Wiley Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology University of California, Los Angeles http://www.joshuawiley.com/ ______________________________________________ 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.