R - remove anything after comma from column

Question

I\'d like to strip this column so that it just shows last name - if there is a comma I\'d like to remove the comma and anything after it. I have data column that is a mix of

Answer 1

You could use gsub() and some regex:

> x <- 'Day, Bobby Jean'
> gsub("(.*),.*", "\\1", x)
[1] "Day"