Extracting numbers from vectors of strings

Question

I have string like this:

years<-c(\"20 years old\", \"1 years old\")

I would like to grep only the numeric number from this vector. Expe

Answer 1

We can also use str_extract from stringr

years<-c("20 years old", "1 years old")
as.integer(stringr::str_extract(years, "\\d+"))
#[1] 20  1

If there are multiple numbers in the string and we want to extract all of them, we may use str_extract_all which unlike str_extract returns all the macthes.

years<-c("20 years old and 21", "1 years old")
stringr::str_extract(years, "\\d+")
#[1] "20"  "1"

stringr::str_extract_all(years, "\\d+")

#[[1]]
#[1] "20" "21"

#[[2]]
#[1] "1"