Drop characters based on position

user_14518614 0
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I would like to drop the characters obovate at second position

df <- data.frame(x = c("Antidesma obovate",
                       "Ardisia obovate", "Knema obovate", "Lauraceae obovate"))

My desired output

Antidesma
Ardisia
Knema
Lauraceae

I found one topic kind of answering my quesion (Drop characters from string based on position)

but here I need to call specific character that I want to remove. So far, I only know using str_detect to change the name right away e.g.

df %>% mutate(x= ifelse(str_detect(x, "Antidesma obovate"), "Antidesma ", x)) %>%

Any suggestions for me, please?

tidyverse r
3 Answers

We don't need ifelse or str_detect here. Instead, use str_remove the remove the substring

library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
df %>% 
   mutate(x = str_remove(x, "\\s+obovate"))
          x
1 Antidesma
2   Ardisia
3     Knema
4 Lauraceae
user_37322710

Another option is to use gsub:

gsub(" obovate", "", df$x)
user_119419720

We could use word from stringr package:

library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
df %>% 
  mutate(x = word(x,1))

Output:

          x
1 Antidesma
2   Ardisia
3     Knema
4 Lauraceae
user_133216470
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