Find a word before one of two possible separators

Question

word:12335
anotherword:2323434
totallydifferentword/455
word/32

I need to grab the character string before the : or / usi

Answer 1

You could use the package unglue :

library(unglue)
x <- c("word:12335", "anotherword:2323434", "totallydifferentword/455", "word/32")
unglue_vec(x, "{res}{=[:/].*?}")
#> [1] "word"                 "anotherword"          "totallydifferentword"
#> [4] "word"

^{Created on 2019-10-08 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

• {res} matches anything and will be returned, it's equivalent to {res=.*?}
• {=[:/].*?} matches anything starting with : or / and won't be returned as we have no lhs to =