Extract first word from a column and insert into new column [duplicate]

Answer 1

You can use a regex ("([A-Za-z]+)" or "([[:alpha:]]+)"or "(\\w+)") to grab the first word

Dataframe1$COL2 <- gsub("([A-Za-z]+).*", "\\1", Dataframe1$COL1)

Answer 2

We can use function stringr::word:

library(stringr)

Dataframe1$COL2 <- word(Dataframe2$COL1, 1)

Answer 3

The function strsplit can be useful

Dataframe1$COL2 <- strsplit(Dataframe1$COL1, " ")[[1]][1]

Then you can change the last bracketed number to select other parts from the string too.