Here are a few ways:
1) sub
sub(".*:", "", string)
## [1] "E001" "E002" "E003"
2) strsplit
sapply(strsplit(string, ":"), "[", 2)
## [1] "E001" "E002" "E003"
3) read.table
read.table(text = string, sep = ":", as.is = TRUE)$V2
## [1] "E001" "E002" "E003"
4) substring
This assumes second portion always starts at 4th character (which is the case in the example in the question):
substring(string, 4)
## [1] "E001" "E002" "E003"
4a) substring/regex
If the colon were not always in a known position we could modify (4) by searching for it:
substring(string, regexpr(":", string) + 1)
5) strapplyc
strapplyc
returns the parenthesized portion:
library(gsubfn)
strapplyc(string, ":(.*)", simplify = TRUE)
## [1] "E001" "E002" "E003"
6) read.dcf
This one only works if the substrings prior to the colon are unique (which they are in the example in the question). Also it requires that the separator be colon (which it is in the question). If a different separator were used then we could use sub
to replace it with a colon first. For example, if the separator were _
then string <- sub("_", ":", string)
c(read.dcf(textConnection(string)))
## [1] "E001" "E002" "E003"
7) separate
7a) Using tidyr::separate
we create a data frame with two columns, one for the part before the colon and one for after, and then extract the latter.
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
library(purrr)
DF <- data.frame(string)
DF %>%
separate(string, into = c("pre", "post")) %>%
pull("post")
## [1] "E001" "E002" "E003"
7b) Alternately separate
can be used to just create the post
column and then unlist
and unname
the resulting data frame:
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
DF %>%
separate(string, into = c(NA, "post")) %>%
unlist %>%
unname
## [1] "E001" "E002" "E003"
8) trimws We can use trimws
to trim word characters off the left and then use it again to trim the colon.
trimws(trimws(string, "left", "\\w"), "left", ":")
## [1] "E001" "E002" "E003"
Note
The input string
is assumed to be:
string <- c("G1:E001", "G2:E002", "G3:E003")