how to extract the first number from each string in a vector in R?

Question

I am new to regex in R. Here I have a vector where I am interested in extracting the first occurance of a number in each string of the vector .

I have a vector calle

Answer 1

One option is str_extract from stringr with an as.numeric wrap.

> library(stringr)
> as.numeric(str_extract(shootsummary, "[0-9]+"))
# [1] 34 42 23 27 64

Update In response to your question in the comments of this answer, here's a little explanation. The full explanation of a function can be found in its help file.

• str_extract returns the first occurrence of the regular expression. It is vectorized over the character vector in its first argument.
• The regular expression [0-9]+ matches any character of: '0' to '9' (1 or more times)
• as.numeric changes the resulting character vector into a numeric vector.