regex - Remove the letters between two patterns of strings in R

Question

How can I remove the letters between two specific patterns in R?

For instance

a= "a#g abcdefgtdkfef_jpg>pple"

I would like to remove all the letters between #g and jpg>

a1="apple"

I tried to find some function in stringr but I couldn't

Answer 1

There's no need to load a package for this operation. You can use the base R function sub. It's used to match the first occurrence of a regular expression.

a <- "a#g abcdefgtdkfef_jpg>pple"
sub("#g.*jpg>", "", a)
# [1] "apple"

Regular expression explained:

• #g matches "#g"
• .* matches any character except (zero or more times)
• jpg> matches "jpg>"

So here we're removing everything starting at #g up to and including jpg>

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In regards to your comment

I tried to find some function in stringR but I couldn't

It's actually spelled stringr (case-sensitive). You could use str_replace.

library(stringr)
str_replace(a, "#g.*jpg>", "")
# [1] "apple"