How to get the first 10 words in a string in R?

Question

I have a string in R as

x <- \"The length of the word is going to be of nice use to me\"

I want the first 10 words of the above specifi

Answer 1

Regular expression (regex) answer using \w (word character) and its negation \W:

gsub("^((\\w+\\W+){9}\\w+).*$","\\1",x)

1. ^ Beginning of the token (zero-width)
2. ((\\w+\\W+){9}\\w+) Ten words separated by not-words.
   1. (\\w+\\W+){9} A word followed by not-a-word, 9 times
      1. \\w+ One or more word characters (i.e. a word)
      2. \\W+ One or more non-word characters (i.e. a space)
      3. {9} Nine repetitions
   2. \\w+ The tenth word
3. .* Anything else, including other following words
4. $ End of the token (zero-width)
5. \\1 when this token found, replace it with the first captured group (the 10 words)