Extract first N digits from a string

Question

I want to extract just FIRST TWO DIGITS from some strings. Suppose the data is :

ABC Conference Room Monitor - Z5580J    
ABC 19 Monitor    
ABC 24 Monitor f         


        

Answer 1

One solution with stringr is:

library(stringr)
string <- str_extract_all("ABC Conference Room Monitor - Z5580J","\\(?[0-9,.]+\\)?")[[1]]
# "\\(?[0-9,.]+\\)?" is the regex, extracts only numbers
as.numeric(substr(string , 1,2)) # this selects the first two elements
#as.numeric is optional