Extract last word in string in R

Question

What\'s the most elegant way to extract the last word in a sentence string?

The sentence does not end with a \".\" Words are seperated by blanks.

sen         


        

Answer 1

Going in the package direction, this is the simplest answer I can think of:

library(stringr)

x <- 'The quick brown fox'
str_extract(x, '\\w+$')
#[1] "fox"

Answer 2

tail(strsplit('this is a sentence',split=" ")[[1]],1)

Basically as suggested by @Señor O.

Answer 3

Just for completeness: The library stringr contains a function for exactly this problem.

library(stringr)

sentence <- "The quick brown fox"
word(sentence,-1)
[1] "fox"

Answer 4

Another packaged option is stri_extract_last_words() from the stringi package

library(stringi)

stri_extract_last_words("The quick brown fox")
# [1] "fox"

The function also removes any punctuation that may be at the end of the sentence.

stri_extract_last_words("The quick brown fox? ...")
# [1] "fox"

Answer 5

x <- 'The quick brown fox'
sub('^.* ([[:alnum:]]+)$', '\\1', x)

That will catch the last string of numbers and characters before then end of the string.

You can also use the regexec and regmatches functions, but I find sub cleaner:

m <- regexec('^.* ([[:alnum:]]+)$', x)
regmatches(x, m)

See ?regex and ?sub for more info.