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

I would use sub() instead. Since you want the first "word" before the split, we can simply remove everything after the first - and that's what we're left with.

sub("-.*", "", people$food)

Here's an example -

x <- c("apple", "banana-raspberry-cherry", "orange-berry", "tomato-apple")
sub("-.*", "", x)
# [1] "apple"  "banana" "orange" "tomato"

Otherwise, if you want to use strsplit() you can round up the first elements with vapply()

vapply(strsplit(x, "-", fixed = TRUE), "[", "", 1)
# [1] "apple"  "banana" "orange" "tomato"