Given a text like I want to be able to extract a matched regular expression from a piece of text.
this apparently works, but is pretty ugly # some html test<-"</tr><tr><th>88958</th><th>Abcdsef</th><th>67.8S</th><th>68.9\nW</th><th>26m</th>" # a pattern to extract 5 digits > pattern<-"[0-9]{5}" # regexpr returns a start point[1] and an attribute "match.length" attr(,"match.length) # get the substring from the start point to the stop point.. where stop = start +length-1 > answer<-substr(test,regexpr(pattern,test)[1],regexpr(pattern,test)[1]+attr(regexpr(pattern,test),"match.length")-1) > answer [1] "88958" I tried using sub(pattern, replacement, x ) with a regexp that captured the group. I'd found an example of this in the mails but it didnt seem to work.. [[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.