Remove characters preceding the first capital letter in a string in R

Question

I am trying to remove all characters preceding the first capital letter instance for each line in a line vector:

x <- c(" its client Auto Group",  "itself and Phone Company", ", client Large Bank")

I tried:

sub('.*?[A-Z]', '', x)

But this returns:

"uto Group"  "hone Company"   "arge Bank"

I need to return it:

"Auto Group"    "Phone Company" "Large Bank"

Any ideas?

Thank.

+4

carozimm Jun 15 '16 at 17:37

1 answer

Wiktor stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-15T17:52:03+0000

You need to use a capture group with a backlink:

sub("^.*?([A-Z])", "\\1", x)

Here

^ - beginning of line
.*? - any 0+ characters as small as possible
([A-Z])- capture group 1, capturing the capital letter ASCII, which will be referenced \1in the replacement template.

So, we are restoring what we recorded as a result with reverse replication.