I have the name of a file like this: name1.csv
and I would like to extract two substrings of this string. One that stores the name1
in one variable and other that stores the extension, csv
, without the dot in another variable.
I have been searching if there is a function like indexOf
of Java that allows to do that kind of manipulation, but I have not found anything at all.
Any help?
Use strsplit
:
R> strsplit("name1.csv", "\\.")[[1]]
[1] "name1" "csv"
R>
Note that you a) need to escape the dot (as it is a metacharacter for regular expressions) and b) deal with the fact that strsplit()
returns a list of which typically only the first element is of interest.
A more general solution involves regular expressions where you can extract the matches.
For the special case of filenames you also have:
R> library(tools) # unless already loaded, comes with base R
R> file_ext("name1.csv")
[1] "csv"
R>
and
R> file_path_sans_ext("name1.csv")
[1] "name1"
R>
as these are such a common tasks (cf basename
in shell etc).