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

Also try strsplit:

string <- c("Sample, A", "Tester", "Wifred, Nancy", "Day, Bobby Jean", "Morris")

sapply(strsplit(string, ","), "[", 1)
#[1] "Sample" "Tester" "Wifred" "Day"    "Morris"