Dear all, I have a dataframe of names (netw), with each cell including last name and initials of an author; some cells have NA. I would like to extract only the last name from each cell; this new dataframe is calle 'res'
Here is what I do: res <- data.frame(matrix(NA, nrow=dim(netw)[1], ncol=dim(netw)[2])) for (i in 1:x) { wh <- regexpr('[a-z]{3,}', as.character(netw[,i])) res[i] <- substring(as.character(netw[,i]), wh, wh + attr(wh,'match.length')-1) } the problem is that I cannot manage to extract 'complex' names properly such as ' van der hoops bf ': here I only get 'van', the real last name is 'van der hoops' and 'bf' are the initials. Basically the last name has always a minimum of 3 consecutive letters, but may have 3 or more letters separated by one or more space; the cell may start by a space too; initials never have more than 2 letters. Someone would have a nice idea for that? Thanks, David [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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