Extract last word in string in R

Question

What\'s the most elegant way to extract the last word in a sentence string?

The sentence does not end with a \".\" Words are seperated by blanks.

sen         


        

Answer 1

x <- 'The quick brown fox'
sub('^.* ([[:alnum:]]+)$', '\\1', x)

That will catch the last string of numbers and characters before then end of the string.

You can also use the regexec and regmatches functions, but I find sub cleaner:

m <- regexec('^.* ([[:alnum:]]+)$', x)
regmatches(x, m)

See ?regex and ?sub for more info.