I have a large dataset with two sorts of labels. The first is of the form ‘numeric_alphanumeric_alpha’ and another which is ‘alphanumeric_alpha’. I need to strip the numeric prefix from the first label so that it matches the second label. I know how to remove numbers from alphanumeric data (as below) but this would remove numbers that I need.
gsub('[0-9]+', '', x)
Below is an example of the two different labels I am encountered with well as the prefer
c('12345_F24R2_ABC', 'r87R2_DEFG')
Below is the desired output
c('F24R2_ABC', 'r87R2_DEFG')
>Solution :
A simple regex can do it. ^ refers to the start of a string, \\d refers to any digits, + indicates one or more time it appears.
gsub("^\\d+_", "", c('12345_F24R2_ABC', 'r87R2_DEFG'), perl = T)
[1] "F24R2_ABC" "r87R2_DEFG"