First entry from string split

Question

I\'ve got a column people$food that has entries like chocolate or apple-orange-strawberry.

I want to split people$food

Answer 1

For example

word <- 'apple-orange-strawberry'

strsplit(word, "-")[[1]][1]
[1] "apple"

or, equivalently

unlist(strsplit(word, "-"))[1].

Essentially the idea is that split gives a list as a result, whose elements have to be accessed either by slicing (the former case) or by unlisting (the latter).

If you want to apply the method to an entire column:

first.word <- function(my.string){
    unlist(strsplit(my.string, "-"))[1]
}

words <- c('apple-orange-strawberry', 'orange-juice')

R: sapply(words, first.word)
apple-orange-strawberry            orange-juice 
                "apple"                "orange"