How to extract a string between a space and a dot (.)?

Question

I have this string:

"White, Mr. George Voultsios"

And I would like to extract the part between the space and the dot:

"Mr"

Possible duplicate of [Learning Regular Expressions](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4736/learning-regular-expressions) — Wiktor Stribiżew, Apr 10 '17 at 13:27

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 10 '17 at 11:29

0

x<-"White, Mr. George Voultsios"
sub(".* ","",sub("\\..*","",x))
[1] "Mr"

answered Apr 10 '17 at 11:29

Erdem Akkas

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 10 '17 at 11:38

You could use regular expressions with a lookbehind for the space and a lookahead for the dot:

## The data:    
x <- c("White, Mr. George Voultsios", "LastName, Mrs. Firstname")

Using the base package:

regmatches(x, regexpr("(?<= ).*(?=\\.)", x, perl = TRUE))
# [1] "Mr"  "Mrs"

Using the package stringr:

library(stringr)
stringr::str_extract(x, "(?<= ).*(?=\\.)")
# [1] "Mr"  "Mrs"

What the pattern (?<= ).*(?=\\.) does is:

2 Answers2