Get the strings before the comma with R

Question

I am a beginner with R. Now, I have a vector in a data.frame like this

city
Kirkland,
Bethesda,
Wellington,
La Jolla,
Berkeley,
Costa, Evie KW172NJ
Miami,
P         


        

Answer 1

You could use regexpr to find the position of the first comma in each element and use substr to snip them at this:

x <- c("London, UK", "Paris, France", "New York, USA")

substr(x,1,regexpr(",",x)-1)
[1] "London"   "Paris"    "New York"