Thank you Jim, The code did assist me to get the what I needed. Also, I learnt that there are different types of dashes (en-dash/em-dash/hyphen) as explained on this site : http://www.punctuationmatters.com/hyphen-dash-n-dash-and-m-dash/
I achieved it by executing below command after going through this page on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9223795/how-to-correctly-deal-with-escaped-unicode-characters-in-r-e-g-the-em-dash splitends<-sapply(end,strsplit,"-|\u2013|,") where '\u2013' is, i guess, the unicode for en-dash/em-dash character in the ranges values. I had scrapped the HTML table from this web page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Heritage_in_Danger and range values does have en-dash characters. For now the issue is resolved but how does one capture values similar to '\u2013' for other possible special cases to be specified in the regex ? Regards, Sunny Singha. On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 12:39 PM, Jim Lemon <drjimle...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Sunny, > Try this: > > # notice that I have replaced the fancy hyphens with real hyphens > end<-c("2001-","1992-","2013-","2013-","2013-","2013-", > "1993-2007","2010-","2012-","1984-1992","1996-","2015-") > splitends<-sapply(end,strsplit,"-") > last_bit(x) return(x[length(x)]) > sapply(splitends,last_bit) > > Jim > > On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 4:35 PM, Sunny Singha > <sunnysingha.analyt...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi, >> I have a char vector with year values. Some cells have single year >> value '2001-' and some have range like 1996-2007. >> I need to remove hyphen character '-' from all the values within the >> character vector named as 'end'. After removing the hyphen I need to >> get the last >> number from the cells where there are year range values i.e if the >> cell has range 1996-2007, the code should return me 2007. >> >> How could I get this done? >> >> Below are the values within this char vector: >> >>> end >> [1] "2001-" "1992-" "2013-" "2013-" >> "2013-" "2013-" >> [7] "2003-" "2010-" "2009-" "1986-" >> "2012-" "2003-" >> [13] "2005-" "2013-" "2003-" "2013-" >> "1993–2007, 2010-" "2012-" >> [19] "1984–1992, 1996-" "2015-" "2009-" "2000-" >> "2005-" "1997-" >> [25] "2012-" "1997-" "2002-" "2006-" >> "1992-" "2007-" >> [31] "1997-" "1982-" "2015-" "2015-" >> "2010-" "1996–2007, 2011-" >> [37] "2004-" "1999-" "2007-" "1996-" >> "2013-" "2012-" >> [43] "2012-" "2010-" "2011-" "1994-" >> "2014-" >> >> I tried below command--> gsub('[-|,]', '', end) >> This did remove all the hyphen character but not from cells having >> range year values.Below is the result after executing above command: >> As you see hypphen character is removed from single values but not >> from ranges. Please guide. >> >>> gsub('[-|,]', '', end) >> [1] "2001" "1992" "2013" "2013" >> "2013" "2013" "2003" >> [8] "2010" "2009" "1986" "2012" >> "2003" "2005" "2013" >> [15] "2003" "2013" "1993–2007 2010" "2012" >> "1984–1992 1996" "2015" "2009" >> [22] "2000" "2005" "1997" "2012" >> "1997" "2002" "2006" >> [29] "1992" "2007" "1997" "1982" >> "2015" "2015" "2010" >> [36] "1996–2007 2011" "2004" "1999" "2007" >> "1996" "2013" "2012" >> [43] "2012" "2010" "2011" "1994" >> "2014" >> >> Regards, >> Sunny Singha >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see >> 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. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.
