many thanks, Berend. It works well... but with a problem because i was not completely clear in my first email.
It works with cases such as: Franco (El) Regueras (Las) but not with other cases such as: Fauces de San Andrés (Las) any hints? or meaybe if it is very complicated, any short explanation of the perl expression you wrote (as far as I can understand, the point is this \\3 \\1...). thx again On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 11:12:24AM +0100, Berend Hasselman wrote: > > On 13-03-2012, at 10:42, Igor Sosa Mayor wrote: > > > Hi R-Users, > > > > I want to manipulate some strings in the following way. I have the > > following vector with spanish municipalities: > > > > municipios<-c("Allande", "Aller", "Amieva", "Avilés", "Belmonte de > > Miranda", > > "Degaña", "Franco (El)", "Gijón", "Gozón", "Grado", "Grandas de Salime", > > "Quirós", "Regueras (Las)", "Ribadedeva", "Ribadesella", "Ribera de > > Arriba") > > > > The problem is: some names have an article ("Franco (El)", "Regueras > > (Las)"). Others don't. I want to do the following conversion: > > > > "Regueras (Las)"---> "Las Regueras" > > > > That is: I want to loop through the names, look whether they have a > > postponed article, extract and delete this article and put it in front > > of the rest of the name. > > > > Any hints? Thanks in advance. > > > gsub("([^\\s]+)\\s*(\\()(.*)(\\))","\\3 \\1", municipios, perl=TRUE) > > > Berend > -- :: Igor Sosa Mayor :: joseleopoldo1...@gmail.com :: :: GnuPG: 0x69804897 :: http://www.gnupg.org/ :: ______________________________________________ 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.